Constructing cultures then and now : celebrating Franz Boas and the Jesup North Pacific Expedition

1. Constructing cultures then and now : celebrating Franz Boas and the Jesup North Pacific Expedition

2. Table of Contents

Constructing cultures then and now : celebrating Franz Boas and the Jesup North Pacific Expedition

Kendall, Laurel

Krupnik, Igor

Arctic Studies Center (National Museum of Natural History)

American Museum of Natural History

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Contributions toCircumpolar Anthropology 4National Museum of Natural HistorySmithsonian Institution2003

ArcticC^enter

(Constructing (Cultures^hen and !\]ow

(Celebrating f^ranz £)oa5 and the JesupNorth faclhc Expedition

Smithsoniant ^ InstitutionX^^ir^ Libraries

Gift of

IGOR KRUPNIKARCTIC STUDIES CENTER

Constructing Cultures Then and Now

Celebrating Franz Boas and theJesup North Pacific Expedition

Vancouver International Airport in Vancouver, B.C., greets passengers with two "Welcome Figures"created bySalish artist Susan Point (1996). Photograph courtesy Bill McLennan.

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( NOV 2 4 j

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Contributors viiList of Tables xList of Figures xiAbbreviations xivNote on Cyrillic Transliteration xvFOREWORD XVll

INTRODUCTION: A CENTENARY AND A CELEBRATION

Laurel Kendall and Igor Krupnik 1

part One

100 Years of Jesup: The Intellectual Legacy ofthejesup Expedition

"THE AIM OF THE EXPEDITION . . , HAS IN THE MAIN BEEN ACCOMPLISHED":WORDS, DEEDS, AND LEGACIES OF THE JESUP NORTH PACIFIC EXPEDITIONIgor Krupnik and Nikolai Vakhtin 1 5

THE SO-CALLED "ESKIMO WEDGE": A CENTURY AFTER JESUP

Don E. Dumond 3 3

FAILING AT BERING STRAIT? JESUP NORTH PACIFIC EXPEDITION ANDTHE STUDY OF CULTURE CONTACT

Peter P. Schweitzer 49

DIFFUSION AND COLONIAL ANTHROPOLOGY: THEORIES OF CHANGE INTHE CONTEXT OF JESUP 1

Molly Lee and Nelson H. H. Graburn 79

THE JESUP EXPEDITION AND ITS ANALOGUES: A COMPARISON

Stanley A. Freed, Ruth S. Freed, and Laila Williamson 89

part ~]~wo

Anthropologies and Histories: Jesup Participants Then and Now

FRANZ BOAS AND THE MUSIC OF THE NORTHWEST COAST INDIANS

Ira Jacknis 1 0 5

BEYOND BOAS? RE-ASSESSING THE CONTRIBUTION OF "INFORMANT"AND "RESEARCH ASSISTANT": JAMES A. TEIT

Wendy Wickwire 123

FRANZ BOAS AND AN "UNFINISHED JESUP" ON SAKHALIN ISLAND:

SHEDDING NEW LIGHT ON BERTHOLD L^UFER AND BRONISLAW PILSUDSKI

Koichi Inoue 1 35

LOUIS SHOTRIDCE AND INDIGENOUS TLINCIT ETHNOGRAPHY:THEN AND NOW

Nora Marks Dauenhauer and Richard Dauenhauer

BILINGUAL/BICULTURAL INFORMANTS AND INTERPRETERS OF THE JESUPEXPEDITION ERASergei Kan

ree

165

185

People, Animals, and Land: A Jesup Theme Revisited

THE JESUP EXPEDITION AND THE MODERNIZATION OF NORTH PACIFIC NATURALHISTORY

Robert S. Hoffmann 201

THE LANGUAGES OF THE NORTH PACIFIC RIM, 1897-1997, AND THEJESUP EXPEDITION

Michael E. Krauss 211

GENETIC PREHISTORY OF PALEOASIATIC SPEAKING POPULATIONS OF

NORTHEASTERN SIBERIA AND THEIR RELATIONSHIPS TO NATIVE AMERICANS

Theodore G. Schurr and Douglas C. Wallace 2 39

THE POST-JESUP CENTURY OF RESEARCH INTO THE PREHISTORY OFNORTHEASTERN SIBERIA

Sergei A. Arutiunov 259

LIFE IN LOST VILLAGES: HOME, LAND, MEMORY AND THE SENSES OF LOSSIN POST-JESUP KAMCHATKA

David Koester 269

fartT

our Curators, Collectors, and Consumers

HERITAGE ANTHROPOLOGY IN THE "JESUP-2" ERA: EXPLORING NORTHPACIFIC CULTURES THROUGH COOPERATIVE RESEARCHWilliam W. Fitzhugh

ALEUT ARCHAEOLOGY AND CULTURAL HERITAGE: THE LEGACY OF THEJESUP NORTH PACIFIC EXPEDITIONStephen Loring and Douglas W. Veltre

IN MEMORY OF VLADIMIR IVANOV-UNAROV, 1937-2000Marjorie Mandelstam Balzer

THE REVITALIZATION OF THE TRADITIONAL CULTURE OF NORTHEASTSIBERIAN PEOPLES: THE ROLE OF THE JESUP EXPEDITIONVladimir Kh. Ivanov-Unarov and Zinaida I. Ivanova-Unarova

THE INVENTION AND PERPETUATION OF CULTURE: THE BOASIAN LEGACYAND TWO 20"' CENTURY WOMAN TOTEM POLE CARVERSAldona Jonaitis

CONSUMERS, THEN AND NOWGloria Cranmer Webster

287

307

334

336

349

361

vi

contributors

Sergei A. ArMt/wMov works at the Institute of Ethnology and Anthropology in Moscow as Chair of the Depart-ment of the Peoples of the Northern Caucasus. He is a leading Russian expert in ethnology of the Russian North andFar East, as well as a specialist on Japan and South Asia, the archaeology of the Bering Sea region, and Eskimo art.During the 1980s, he was the Russian team leader for the Crossroads of Continents exhibit project.

Nora l\/larks Dauenhauer was born in Juneau, Alaska. She is internationally recognized for her fieldwork,translation and explication of Tlingit oral literature. From 1983 to 1997, she was Principal Researcher in Languageand Cultural Studies at Sealaska Heritage Foundation in Juneau. She is married to Richard Dauenhauer, with whomshe has co-authored several volumes of Tlingit language and folklore material.

Richard Dauenhauer, born and raised in Syracuse, NY, has lived in Juneau, Alaska since 1969. Much of hisprofessional work has focused on applied folklore and linguistics in the study, materials development, and teachertraining in Alaska Native languages and oral literature. From 1 983 to 1 997, he was Director of Language andCultural Studies at Sealaska Heritage Foundation, Juneau.

Don E. Dumond is Professor Emeritus of Anthropology and Director Emeritus of the Museum of Natural Historyat the University of Oregon, Eugene. For more than forty years he has focused on archaeological fieldwork insouthwestern Alaska. He has written widely on the prehistory of Alaska.

William W. Fitzhugh is Director of the Arctic Studies Center and Curator at the Department of Anthropology,National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution, in Washington, DC. His interests include circumpolarprehistory and archaeology, maritime adaptations, and culture contacts. He has organized several special exhibitprojects such as Inua; Crossroads of Continents; Ainu; and Vil<ings.

Ruth S. Freed \s a Research Associate in the Division of Anthropology at the AMNH in New York. With StanleyA. Freed, she has co-authored papers on the Washoe, Mohave, and Navajo as well as on thejesup Expedition (alsowith Laila Williamson). She has taught at New York University and Seton Hall University.

Stanley A. Freed'\s Curator Emeritus in the Division of Anthropology at the AMNH in New York. A staff memberat the AMNH since 1960, he was in charge of North American ethnology. He has helped to create or renovate anumber of permanent and temporary exhibitions dealing with the Northwest Coast, the Arctic, the Plains, and theEastern Woodlands.

Nelson H.H. Graburn is Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley and Curator of NorthAmerica at the Phoebe Hearst Museum. He has published extensively on art and culture in the North, on theanthropology of tourism, and the anthropology of Canada and of Japan.

Robert S. Hoffmann is Curator Emeritus at the National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution inWashington, DC, and specializes in adaptation and evolutionary biology of northern land mammals. Formerly the

vii

Director of NMNH and Provost of the Smithsonian, he has worked closely with North American, Russian, Mongolian,and Chinese colleagues in the circumpolar and North Pacific regions.

Koichi Inoue is Professor of Ethnology at the Slavic Research Center of Hokkaido University in Sapporo, Japan.He specializes in the ethnology of indigenous peoples of Siberia and of Northern Eurasia, in general. He did extensivefieldwork in the Russian Far East and Siberia. His current research interests include indigenous reindeer economies;theory of ethnos; and the life and work of Bronislaw Pilsudski.

Vladimir Kh. Ivanov-Unarov (1937-2000) was one of the leading Sakha/Yakut scholars of the cultures ofnorthern minority peoples of the Sakha Republic/Yakutia. He was a Department Chair in the Institute of the Problemsof the Minority Peoples of the North in Yakutsk, Sakha Republic, Russia. Between 1 992-97 he worked onjochelson'sYakut, Yukagir, and Even collections at the American Museum of Natural History in New York, and he initiated arecent Russian translation of Jochelson's monograph on the Yukagir (1 926).

Zinaida I. Ivanova-Unamva is a professor at Yakutsk University in Yakutsk, Sakha Republic, Russia. Originallyfrom a northern Sakha village, she has written extensively on women master artists and on shamanic influences inSiberian Native art. She authored several books on Sakha art and worked with her late husband, Vladimir Ivanov-Unarov, on the Jesup Expedition collections in New York.

Ira Jacknis is Research Anthropologist at the Phoebe Hearst Museum of Anthropology, University of Californiaat Berkeley. His research interests include the art and culture of the Native peoples of Western North America, thehistory of anthropology, museums, and photography. He is the author of The Storage Box of Tradition: KwakiutI Art,Anthropologists, and Museums, 1881-1981 (2002).

Aldona Jonaitis, is Director of the University of Alaska Museum. Prior to her current position, she was VicePresident for Public Programs at the American Museum of Natural History. She has taught at the University of AlaskaFairbanks, SUNY at Stony Brook, and Columbia University. She has authored numerous books, papers, and publica-tions and exhibit catalogs on Northwest Coast Native art.

Sergei Kan is Professor of Anthropology and Native American Studies at Dartmouth College in Hanover, NH.Most of his publications deal with Tlingit culture and the history of Russian Orthodox Christianity in southeasternAlaska. Recently he has been writing a book about Russian anthropologist Lev Shternberg discussing Shternberg'srelationships with Franz Boas and other members of the Jesup Expedition.

Laurel Kendall \s Curator of Asian Ethnographic Collections at the American Museum of Natural History. She isbest known for her writing on shamans, ritual life, and gender issues in Korea. Kendall was Project Director for theAMNH Jesup Centenary celebration and co-editor of a catalog of the photographs of the Jesup Expedition, DrawingShadows to Stone (1 997), with Barbara Mathe and Thomas Ross Miller

David Koester '\s a cultural anthropologist at the University of Alaska Fairbanks and a specialist in the peoplesof the circumpolar North. His publications, based on long-term fieldwork in Iceland and Kamchatka, Russia, havefocused on the ideological, social and material mechanisms associated with socio-cultural change and continuity.

Michael E. Krauss is the former director of the Alaska Native Language Center, University of Alaska Fairbanks.He is a leading specialist in the preservation and survival of the Native languages of Alaska, Siberia, and the circum-polar area. His latest contributions include a detailed map of Native language areas for the Inuit-Yupik-Aleut Regionand a report on the status of indigenous languages of the North for UNESCO.

Igor Krupnik, Arctic Ethnologist at the Arctic Studies Center, Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC, iscurrently coordinator of various international projects studying the impacts of global climate change and the

viii

preservation of cultural heritage and ecological knowledge of Native peoples. He writes extensively on Arcticpeoples, modernization, and minority issues.

Molly Lee holds a joint appointment at the University of Alaska Fairbanks as Curator of Ethnology at theUniversity of Alaska Museum and Professor of Anthropology. She has written extensively on indigenous basketryand art in the North, including most recently Eskimo Architecture (2003), with Gregory A. Reinhardt.

Stephen Loring is Museum Anthropologist with the Arctic Studies Center, Smithsonian Institution in Washing-ton, DC. In addition to caring for the Arctic and Sub-arctic collections, he facilitates access to the collections forvisiting indigenous researchers and promotes Native community interests. He has conducted archaeological andethnohistorical research with Innu and Inuit in Labrador, and has worked in the Aleutian Islands, Peru, and Argentina.

Peter P. Schweitzer is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. Since the mid-1 980s,Schweitzer has focused his research activities on the Russian North, conducting fieldwork in Chukotka and theSakha Republic (Yakutia). His areas of interest include politics, kinship, history, and hunter-gatherer studies. Currentlyhe is writing a book on the history of Siberian anthropology

Theodore G. Schurr is Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology, University of Pennsylvania. Hehas researched the genetic prehistory of Asia and the Americas through studies of mtDNA and Y-chromosomevariation in Asian, Siberian and Native American populations. His current projects apply these techniques to mod-ern Aleuts, indigenous peoples of south-central Siberia, and archaeological populations from the Lake Baikal region.

Nikolai Vakhtin, is a professor at the European University at St. Petersburg, Russia. He teaches courses in fieldlinguistics, sociolinguistics, and the cultural anthropology of Siberia. He has done extensive research on Nativelanguages and modern culture change among the minority peoples of northern Russia. He has written severalbooks and articles on the languages and cultures of the northern indigenous peoples of Siberia.

Douglas W. Veltre is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Alaska Anchorage. He has conducted fieldresearch in the Aleutian and Pribilof islands since 1 971. Much of his work has focused on prehistoric and historicalarchaeology, but he has also researched contemporary and historical subsistence economies and oral history.

Douglas C. Wallace has conducted studies in human biology for the past 25 years. His pioneering work inmitochondrial DNA genetics and biochemistry has led to numerous important insights into human origins andmigrations, including the peopling of Siberia and the Americas. He is currently Director of the Center for Molecularand Mitochondrial Medicine and Genetics at the University of California, Irvine.

Gloria Cranmer Webster ^as born in Alert Bay, British Columbia, Canada. She is a member of the NimpkishBand of the Kwakwaka'wakw (KwakiutI). She founded the U'Mista Cultural Centre at Alert Bay, British Columbia in1980, where she served as Director and Curator. Her many cultural projects include the production of two docu-mentary films and a series of Kwakwala language books and educational materials for local schools.

Wendy Wickwire is Associate Professor in the Department of History and School of Environmental Studies atthe University of Victoria, British Columbia. Her research interests include the oral traditions of the aboriginal peoplesof south-central British Columbia and the history of anthropology in British Columbia, most notably the work ofJames A. Teit.

Laila Williamson is Senior Scientific Assistant for North and South American Ethnology at the AMNH in NewYork. She is a specialist in North American collections and helped renovate permanent exhibitions of NorthwestCoast, Plains and Eastern Woodlands cultures at the AMNH. She has co-authored (with S.A. and R.S. Freed) severalpapers on thejesup Expedition.

ix

ist of tables

Table 1 Selected Radiocarbon Ages for Bering Strait Sites 42

Table 2 Total Number of Recognized Land Mammal Species in Beringia at the End 20 3

of the Nineteenth Century

Table 3 Numbers of Shrews, Marmots, Ground Squirrels, and Grey Voles Recog- 204

nized in Beringia, End of Nineteenth CenturyTable 4 Total Number of Recognized Land Mammal Species in Beringia, Mid- 20 5

twentieth Century

Table 5 Number of Shrews, Marmotines, and Grey Voles Recognized in Beringia, 206

Mid-twentieth Century

Table 6 Total Number of Recognized Land Mammal Species in Beringia, End of 207

Twentieth Century

Table 7 North American Languages Current Status, Sequenced from the Columbia 21 6

River toward the Bering StraitTable 8 Northeastern Asian Languages Current Status, Sequenced from the Bering 2 1 7

Strait toward the Ussuri RiverTable 9 Siberian Populations Analyzed for Genetic Variation 240

Table 10 Haplogroups in Native Siberian and East Asian Populations 241

Table 1 1 CR Sequence Sublineages in Siberian and Native American Populations 24 2

Table 12 Haplogroup Frequencies in Eastern Pacific Rim Populations 243

Table 1 3 Haplogroup Distribution in West Pacific Rim and Siberian Populations 244

Table 14 Sequence Divergence of Siberian and Native American Haplogroups 24 5

Table 1 5 Distribution of Haplogroup A,C, and D Sublineages in Siberian and Native 247

American Populations

X

I c:4" t^i I left I <^

Title: Susan Point's Welcome Figures, 1996 ii

1/ Jochelson's team traveling with the expedition collections, East Siberia, 1902 xvi

2/ "Woman's Potlatch " in Fort Rupert, British Columbia, June 1 898 xvlii

3/ Boas, Bogoras, and Shternberg at the 21 st International Congress of Americanists, 1 924 1 2

4/ Field of Proposed Operations of the Jesup North Pacific Expedition, 1 898 1 7

5/ Northeast Asia and the adjacent northwesternmost section of North America 35

6/ Segment of the original map of the Jesup Expedition activities in the Bering Sea area 54

7/ Jochelson's first expedition camp at the village of Kushka on the Sea of Okhotsk Coast, 1 900 63

8/ The transport of the JNPE collections near Yakutsk, East Siberia, spring 1 902 64

9/ Waldemar Bogoras with the expedition freight at Mariinsky Post, Siberia, 1901 65

1 0/ Jochelson's reindeer team with the JNPE collections. East Siberia, 1 901 66

11/Jesup Expedition Siberian collections displayed at the AMNH 67

1 2/ Example of old Eskimo twined basketry (pack sack) issran (Central Yup'ik), 1952 68

1 3/ Coiled willow-root basket. Sledge Island, Norton Sound, 1 878-81 68

14/ Closeup of grass-coiling technique 69

1 5/ Closeup of twined-grass technique 69

16/ IVIiner Bruce basket from Kotzebue Sound 69

1 7/ Early coiled beach-grass basket, northern Alaska, 1 887 70

18/ Coiled willow "tobacco basket", with attached sea-mammal hide bag, Pt. Barrow, 1881-3 70

1 9/ Eskimo in skin boats ready to trade with the passing ship, Port Clarence, Alaska, 1 899 71

20/ North Pacific-Siberian-Alaskan Trade Systems, circa 1797-1900 72-3

21/ Saint Lawrence Island coiled beach-grass tray, 1912 74

22/ Chukchi basket, JNPE collection, 1 900-1 74

23/ Beach at Port Clarence, Alaska, with several whaling ships anchored in the harbor, 1 899 75

24/ Koryak coiled grass basket, JNPE collection, 1900-1 76

25/ Koryak coiled willow root basket, JNPE collection, 1900-1 76

26/ Chinese tea basket, bamboo with porcelain tea cups, JNPE collection, 1 898-99 77

27/ Ainu basket from Hokkaido, 1901 77

28/ Koryak basket makers at work, 1900-01 78

29/ Dina Jochelson-Brodsky steps out of the expedition's winter headquarters, 1901 102

30/ KwakiutI Indians dancing at the Chicago Worlds Fair, 1893 143

31/ Franz Boas, with George Hunt and his family. Fort Rupert, B.C., 1894 144

32/ Musical notation by Franz Boas: Song of Ha'mshamtses 145

33/ Hamatsa skull rattle, Quatsino, B.C., 1 899 1 46

34/ Pit house, Spences Bridge, B.C., 1 897 1 46

35/ Wax cylinder machine: Edison Standard Phonograph with horn, circa 1900 147

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36/ Lucy Antko, wife of James Teit, 1 897 1 48

37/James Teit and two friends in Lerwick, Scotland, prior to his departure to Canada 1 49

38/James Teit's uncle John Murray in British Columbia, circa 1 888 1 49

39/Spences Bridge, B.C., 1 887 150

40/ Spences Bridge, circa 1890 1 50

41 / Drying salmon on the beach on the north side of the Thompson River, B.C. 1 5 1

42/ James Teit and his wife Lucy Antko, 1 897 1 5 2

43/James Teit in his cabin at Tswall Creek 1 5 3

44/ James Teit and George Tomaxkain on the banks of the Thompson River, 1 890 1 54

45/ James A. Teit and Harlan I. Smith's pack train, Spences Bridge 1 5 5

46/ Bronislaw Pilsudski, three "Oltchi" (Ulchi) men, and a local settler 1 56

47/ Sakhalin's Ainu bear festival 1 5 7

48/ Sakhalin Ainu women 1 57

49/Sakhalin Ainu bear festival 158

50/ Tlingit dagger, with a sheath collected by Louis Shotridge in Sitka, 1918 171

51/ Yendaayank' - the last direct descendant of the Tlingit chief Eagle Head 1 71

52/ Sergei Kostromitinov, circa 1900 190

53/ A group of the "forest" Yukagir on the Yassachnaya River, fall 1 901 1 98

54/ Waldemar Jochelson, Norman Buxton, and Waldemar Bogoras in San Francisco, spring 1900 22 3

55/ Norman Buxton, a local Russian officer, and his secretary in Gizhiga, Siberia, spring 1901 224

56/Buxton's cabin in Gizhiga, Siberia, spring 1 901 22 5

57/ Shestakova, a Koryak winter settlement at Penzhina Bay, Siberia, winter 1901 22 5

58/ Native dog-teams in Markovo, Anadyr River valley, winter 1901 226

59/ The town of Markovo, Anadyr River valley, winter 1901 226

60/ Mr. Nikolai Sokolnikov, commanding officer of the Anadyr District, in Markovo, winter 1901 227

61/ Dried salmon on the sled, used for both human and dog food, Markovo, winter 1901 2 27

62/ A group of Yakut (Sakha) children, 1 902 2 2 8

63/ A group of Maritime Koryak children, 1900 229

64/ Itelmen poet Anatoly Levkovsky, with his wife Tatiana and son Nikolai 2 30

65/ Itelmen elder and educator Tatiana Petrovna Lukashkina 231

66/ The village of Kovran in 1 994 from across the Kovran River 2 32

67/ Store closed, Verkhne Khairiuzovo, February 1994 2 32

68/ The remains of the Kovran clubhouse {dom kul'tury) 2 3 3

69/ The village of Verkhne Khairiuzovo, summer of 1 992 2 3 3

70/ Itelmen elder Tatiana Petrovna Lukashkina speaks to a group of children,1 995 2 34

71/ Itelmen elders from Kovran, at an Itelmen gathering in 1995 23 5

72/ The site of the now closed village of Moroshechnoe as it appeared in 1996 2 36

73/ Aleksander Tolman in the once abandoned village of Kirganik, reoccupied in the 1 990s 2 3 7

74/ Afanasii Reshetnikov, one of Kirganik's elderly resettlers, in front of his house, 1 997 2 3 7

75/ Family of the Chief of the Tundra Yukagir band, winter 1 902 2 38

76/ Neighbor-joining tree for aboriginal Siberian and East Asian populations 248

77/ Neighbor-joining tree for aboriginal Siberian populations 249

78/ Neighbor-joining tree for Native Siberian and East Asian populations 251

79/ Map of Kamchatka, showing local communities and abandoned villages 2 74

80/ King Island Inupiat dancers perform at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History, 1988 2 84

xii

81 / The American Crossroads of Continents team in St. Petersburg, Russia, 1 983 2 86

82/Jim VanStone demonstrates a Tlingit war lielmet from the MAE collection, 1983 30 5

83/ Aleut laborers working for the Jochelsons excavate an Aleut barabara on Umnak Island 3 06

84/ George Tsaroff, soon after starting to work at the Smithsonian Institution, ca. 1 878 309

85/ Crossroads of Continents exhibit at the Anchorage Museum of History and Art, 1 991 3 1 9

86/ Sergei Serov (1 940-1 992), Russian Crossroads exhibit coordinator 320

87/ The North American Crossroads team at the MAE in 1 983 3 20

88/ Andres Slapinsh, Latvian film producer, among the Evenk people in East Siberia 321

89/ The Mini-Crossroads team departing on its tour to Siberia from Nome, 1 990 321

90/ Mini-Crossroads exhibit being unloaded from a Russian Yak-40, Vladivostok, 1997 322

9] / Mini-Crossroads in Russia: school tours at the exhibit, Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk, 1997 322

92/Jochelson s display of his Aleut collection at the Imperial Russian Geographical Society 32 3

93/ Aleut children photographed by Waldemar Jochelson 32 3

94/ Waldemar Jochelson with Aleut laborers on Umnak Island, 1 909 3 24

95/ Excavations at the Margaret Bay archaeological site dated to 3100 B.P. 324

96/ A portion of the village of St. Paul in the Pribilof Islands 32 5

97/ The Atka Dancers (Atxam Taliigisnikangis) at the Aleut Elders' Conference, Unalaska, 1 996 32 5

98/ Sakha/Yakut artisan, Anna Nikolaeva dressed in a fur coat or buuktaal<h son 326

99/ Same fur coat, back view 3 26

100/ Birch-bark container (woman's storage box). Made by Anna Nikolaeva 327

101/ Woman's fur coat. Created for characters in the Sakha/Yakut opera Nyurgun Bootur 327

102/ Musqueam house post purchased by Harlan Smith, 1898 328

103/ Susan Point's House Posts, 1997 32 8

104/ Masset village, Haida, 1879 329

105/ Alert Bay, Kwakwaka'wakw, 1910 3 30

106/ Ellen Neel (1916-1966), 1950 331

107/ Mungo Martin (1880-1962) 331

1 08/Ellen Neel's Tbtem/anrfPo/e, 1950 3 32

109/ Matthias Joe Capilano's Thunderbird Dynasty Pole, Vancouver, B. C, 1936 3 32

1 10/Susan Point (b. 1952), 1997 333

111/ Susan Point, Common Thread, 2000 3 3 3

I 1 2/ Vladimir Ivanov-Unarov (1 937-2000) 3 34

II 3/ Sakha (Yakut) ysyakh festival at the village of Churapcha, May 1 902 3 3 511 4/ Susan Point's Spindle Whorl, Vancouver International Airport, 1 994 348

xiii

abbreviations

AMNH American Museum of Natural History, New York, NY

AlVINH-BTC American Museum of Natural History, Department of Anthropology Archives, Boas-TeitCorrespondence

AMNH-DA American Museum of Natural History, Department of Anthropology Archives

AFS American Folklore Society

ANB Alaska Native Brotherhood

ANCSA Alaska Native Land Claims Settlement Act, 1971

A/PIA Aleutian/Pribilof Islands Association

APS-BP American Philosophical Society, Franz Boas Papers

ARCA Alaska Russian Church Archives, Manuscript Division (microfilm). Library of Congress,Washnigton, DC

ASC Arctic Studies Center, Department of Anthropology, Smithsonian Institution

BAAS British Association for the Advancement of Science

BAE Bureau of American Ethnology, Washington, DC

BCPA British Columbia Provincial Archives,Vancouver, British Columbia

BIA Bureau of Indian Affiars, Department of the Interior, Washington, DC

GNPR Greater North Pacific Region

IREX International Research and Exchange Board

JNPE Jesup North Pacific Expedition, 1897-1902

LC Library of Congress, Washington, DC

MAE Peter the Great Museum of Anthropology and Ethnology (Kunstkammer), St. Petersburg,Russia

NAA National Anthropological Archives, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC

NAGPRA Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, 1990

NEH National Endowment for the Humanities

NIMA National Image and Mapping Agency

NMAI National Museum of the American Indian, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC

NMNH National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC

NSF National Science Foundation

RAG Russian-American Company

RBCM Royal British Columbia Museum, Vancouver, Canada

SITES Smithsonian Institution Traveling Exhibit Service, Washington, DC

UBC University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada

UPM The University Museum, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia

xiv

note on CMnl ictransiiterarion

Two coexisting systems are in use in the United Statesfor transliterating Russian Cyrillic letters into English:that of the Library of Congress (LC), and that of theNational Image and Mapping Agency (NIMA, formerlythe U.S. Board of Geographic Names). The LC system isused for bibliographic references; the NIMA system ap-plies to geographic names (place names) and to mostethnic names.

All Russian or Siberian geographic names aretransliterated here according to the NIMA system,which uses ya, yu, and yo for Cyrillic >?, /o, and e(Yakutsk, Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk, etc.). Throughout thisvolume, Native Siberian ethnic names are transliter-ated in accordance with the Peoples of the SovietUnion map produced by the National GeographicSociety in 1989, which basically adheres to theNIMA system (Yakut, Yukagir, Koryak, Nanay, etc.).Most of these ethnic names are already establishedin Western anthropological literature—thanks largelyto the Jesup Expedition's pioneering publications.This system also results in names reminiscent of sev-eral Native American group titles familiar to NorthAmerican readers: Yurok, Maya, Yup'ik, Eyak, Yokut,Yakutat Tlingit, and so on. Furthermore, the NIMA-based spelling of ethnic and geographic names issimilar to the Russian/Cyrillic transliteration systemadopted in England and Canada and to the one com-monly used by modern Russian authors when writ-ing papers in English. The NIMA-based system is alsoapplied here for transliterating a few Russian or

Native Siberian personal names, words, and ethno-graphic terms in individual papers.

In contrast to the NIMA system, the Library of Con-gress transliteration system uses ia, in, and io for theCyrillic fi, /o and e and an apostrophe for the Russiansoft sign (b). Because today's highly standardized elec-tronic library catalog formats are based on the LC sys-tem, names of Russian authors and all titles of items inthe bibliographic reference sections in this volume ad-here to the LC system. Using two transliteration sys-tems in a single book may be inconvenient, but everyeffort has been made to adhere strictly to each ofthese patterns in its designated application in order toestablish a high level of consistency for all future Arc-tic Studies Center publications. For the convenience ofreaders, an alternative NIMA-based transliteration ofRussian authors' names is sometimes provided in pa-rentheses in those cases where such a pattern has beenestablished by earlier publications (for example, theoriginal Jesup Expedition series; Antliropology of theNorth: Translations from Russian Sources). Despite allour efforts, we may not have been able to eliminate allpotential cases of confusion or the occasional idio-syncratic usage.

We are grateful to our colleagues Pavel llyin (U.S.Holocaust Museum), Michael Krauss (Alaska Native Lan-guage Center, University of Alaska), and MarjorieMandelstam Balzer (editor, Anthropology and Archeol-ogy of Eurasia) for their advice on transliteration prac-tices for ASC publications.

XV

I 7 2-jr

//Jochelson's team traveling with tlie expedition collections along the Tos-Khayakhtakh mountain range, EastSiberia, winter 1902 (AMNH 1725)

I

orc\Nor

This volume marks another important step in the on-going international effort to explore the legacy of theJesup North Pacific Expedition of 1 897-1 902, referredto by its participants as "Jesup 2". This book illustrates,once again, the fruitfulness of broad partnerships whenpursuing North Pacific studies, a tradition that beganwith Franz Boas' pioneering enterprise, and it demon-strates how that has developed over the last 1 00 years.

If one were to seek for the roots of Jesup 2, it be-gan in 1977, when the U.S.-Soviet ethnographic exhi-bition, Crossroads of Continents: Cultures of Alaska andSiberia, was first proposed. Over the past twenty-sixyears, these efforts have progressed through a seriesof exhibits, international conferences, workshops, re-search exchanges, collection sharing programs, fellow-ships, and publications. Overtime, the balance of theseactivities gradually shifted from major museums andresearch hubs in Washington, New York, Moscow, andSt. Petersburg to smaller museums and centers in theNorth Pacific region. This shift also meant increasedparticipation by local North Pacific area scholars andNative cultural activists in bringing objects, photo-graphs, and knowledge recovered by the JNPE backinto the homelands where the project originated. Suchefforts helped make the Jesup Expedition familiar tohundreds and thousands local residents in Siberia andNorth America alike.

But the largest effort of Jesup 2, and the inauguralevent for this volume, was the Jesup Centenary Confer-ence at the American Museum. I am greatly indebtedto Laurel Kendall and the American Museum of NaturalHistory in New York for creating, funding, and hosting

so skillfully and graciously this grand international con-vocation that brought together many North Pacific areascholars and representatives of Native Nations to cel-ebrate the centenary of the Jesup Expedition in 1997.I also wish to thank Igor Krupnik for his perseverance inkeeping the spirit of this venture alive by encouragingand heartening its participants over the years.

The appearance of this volume—from the openingof that conference to its appearance under the ArcticStudies Center (ASC) series. Contributions to Circumpo-lar Anthropology—took about the same length of timeto complete as it did for Boas to conduct the JNPEfieldwork a century ago. All in all, it was not until theproceeds from the recent Smithsonian exhibit catalog,Vikings: The North Atlantic Saga, accumulated that itbecame possible for the ASC to start a publicationseries of its own. Here we found a fitting home for thisvolume, in a series which began with another Jesup 2conference collection. Gateways: Exploring the Legacyof the Jesup North Pacific Expedition, 1897-1902, basedon a panel held in 1 993 and published in 2001.

Matters 'anthropological' around the North Pa-cific no longer inhabit the dark recesses of our mu-seum archives and collection cabinets. Newly con-served and stored, they are finding their rightfulplaces both as ideas and as cultural treasures. Andwith the Jesup 2 effort in its third decade, we arehopefully inching toward that enigmatic "Volume1 2" of Boas' original series, the expedition's "Sum-mary and Final Results."

William W. Fitzhugh, DirectorArctic Studies Center

xvii

2/"VJoman's Potlatch" in Fort Rupert, British Columbia, June 1898. Photographer, Harlan I. Smith (AMNH 42992)

xviii

introduction

/A C^entenart) and a (2,eiebration

LAUREL KENDALLAND IGOR KRUPNIK

This volume examines the living legacy of the Ameri-can Museum of Natural History's Jesup North PacificExpedition (1897-1902) and the work of Dr. Franz Boas,the founding father of American anthropology. TheJesup Expedition, as orchestrated by Boas, was a re-search project of such scientific importance and geo-graphical scope that some regard it as the most ambi-tious venture in the history of American Anthropology.Named after Morris K. Jesup, then the president of theAmerican Museum of Natural History (AMNH) and theproject's key sponsor, the expedition set out to inves-tigate the cultural and biological links between indig-enous peoples living in both the Old and the NewWorld—in order to prove that the first Americans hadonce crossed over to North America from Asia. Duringa span of more than five years, the expedition fieldcrews studied, recorded, and collected from severalNative nations across the Greater North Pacific Region.Their efforts were focused upon a huge area, whichextends like a giant arc from the Northwest Coast ofNorth America to the Bering Strait and along the Pa-cific Coast of Siberia to the cultural borderlands of China,Korea, and Japan. The chapters in this volume beganas papers given at a conference held at the AmericanMuseum of Natural History in 1 997 to mark the JesupNorth Pacific Expedition's Centenary. They reflect theenormous scope of the original expedition in both theirbreadth of geographic coverage and the range of is-sues they tackle,

Franz Boas (1858-1942), a German-born naturalscientist, who became the leading American anthro-pologist of the early 20th century, was a pioneer inthe study of culture, race, and ethnicity. His notion of"culture," as distinct from "race" and "language," is pres-ently taken for granted in contemporary American think-ing. Indeed, culture has become a core concept of thesocial sciences and an everyday word frequently in-voked in public discourse. While anthropological no-tions of "culture" have evolved over the interveningcentury, popular understandings hew to a Boasiannotion of culture as the essential configuration of be-liefs, social practices, and material and artistic prod-ucts that define a people.

Today, most anthropologists regard culture as amore mutable construct, anchored within rather thanabove historical circumstance and mediated by theparticular experiences of gender, class, race, and theunfolding of colonial and neo-colonial encounters. Butif the old Boasian notion now seems unfashionably"essentialist" and "a-historical," it is worth recalling thehistorical contingencies of its own construction. Theculture concept, which claimed relative worth for ev-ery human society, was a radical departure from thesupremacist and social-evolutionary thinking of Euro-American science in the late 19th and early 20th cen-turies where hunters, gatherers, and herders—so-called"primitive people"—were cast on the lowest rungs ofan evolutionary hierarchy (Sanjek 1 996).

1

Franz Boas saw anthropology as a holistic enter-prise and the Jesup Expedition was conceptualized fol-lowing his founding vision of the comprehensive an-thropological survey as an integrated scholarly en-deavor (Cole and Long 2001; see also Krupnik andVakhtin, this volume). A single trained fieldworker, or asmall crew of a few professionals, studied social life,folklore, linguistics, prehistory, and biology while alsoassembling museum collections and documenting sig-nificant activities for reproduction as museum exhibits(Miller and Mathe 1997). Boas himself epitomized thesemultiple endeavors in his own fieldwork as did severalotherjesup Expedition participants. Because Jesup sci-entists encountered many Native peoples who hadbeen badly decimated by epidemics and were underheavy pressure to assimilate to the customs and mo-res of the Russians or Anglo-Americans, members ofthe expedition believed that they were recording, col-lecting, and preserving the last traces of vanishing cul-tures. Boas enjoined expedition anthropologists tomake as comprehensive portraits of the peoples theystudied as could possibly be accomplished under lo-cal conditions and using the recording technologyavailable to them at that time. Following his instruc-tions, Jesup ethnologists documented local materialculture, observed daily life and social rites, reproduceddecorative patterns and artistic motifs, and recordedsongs, stories, and myths for linguistic and compara-tive analysis. They took measurements of people, ob-jects, and buildings, and collected artifacts. They alsotook numerous photographs, literally hundreds of them,in order to preserve an "authentic" image of peoplethey surveyed. This was, in its day, cutting-edge field-work for a newly professional anthropology.

Returning from remote regions in Siberia and north-ern North America (Figs.l and 2) to the American Mu-seum in New York, expedition anthropologists broughtback their written observations as well as tangibleobjects, visual images, and recordings of Native lan-guages and on this basis, recomfrwcfet/Native culturesfor scholarly and popular consumption. They produced

a shelf of ethnographies and folklore collections con-sidered "classics" today. Their collections fill the Ameri-can Museum's Hall of Northwest Coast Indians andthe Siberian section of the Gardner D. Stout Hall ofAsian Peoples. Thousands more objects are housed inthe Museum's storerooms and are now publicly ac-cessible via the worldwide web. The Jesup Expeditionarchives include participants' notes and diaries, lettersfrom the field, transcriptions of folklore texts, photo-graphs, wax cylinders, and forms for physical mea-surements.' Through such comprehensive documen-tation. Boas and his colleagues constructedcukures astheory, field sites, configurations of processed data,topical monographs, and museum exhibits aimed atreproducing an idealized pre-contact then, spurred onby the mistaken belief that these cultures were rapidlydisappearing. With the irony of history, the JNPEfieldworkers preserved invaluable cultural treasures,such that one hundred years later (now) the JesupExpedition's legacy is an unsurpassed resource forscholars as well as for peoples of the North Pacificregion who are actively engaged in reconstructing andrevitalizing their cultures in a meaningful present tense.

The Centenary: 1897-1997

The Greater North Pacific Region studied by the JesupExpedition—from northern Japan to the edges of Sibe-ria at the Bering Strait to Alaska to the NorthwestCoast—has been a fertile area of cultural development,innovation, and intercontinental exchange for thou-sands of years. The JNPE teams intended to documentthe biological and cultural links between northernpeoples, and to investigate the ecological and spiri-tual relationship between these people and their harshenvironment as well as religious and artistic traditionswhich defined them. All these issues are of crucial im-portance today as the region copes with the outcomesof reckless commercial exploitation of its natural re-sources and acute environmental degradation duringmuch of the 20th century. Similarly, Native people onboth sides of the intercontinental and political divide

2

INTRODUCTION

at the Bering Strait's crossroads are seeking to revi-talize their ethnic and spiritual identities after de-cades of cultural suppression and forced assimila-tion.

The collections, publications, and archives producedby the Jesup Expedition offer a rich resource to ad-dress these and related issues as part of a global sci-entific and philosophical conversation. The Jesup Ex-pedition team assembled by Dr. Franz Boas mixed edu-cated academic professionals with new recruits, some-times drawn from the local residents, and by includingpeople of Native and mixed origin, former politicalexiles, and women. In this, as well as in many otheraspects of the Expedition's work, Boas's pioneer de-sign laid the groundwork for the present-day multifac-eted "Jesup constituency" that now includes scien-tists from many disciplines and nations. Native schol-ars, artists, cultural activists, film-makers, educators,folk-art performers, museum workers, and a largeand diverse public audience. Much of this diversityis reflected in the community brought together bythe centenary conference and whose work is repre-sented in this volume.

Over the intervening century, all of the sub-fields ofanthropology envisioned by Boas as the tools of onesingle discipline—ethnology, linguistics, archaeology,folklore, biological anthropology, and museum collect-ing and research—have become highly specialized. Theyhave introduced sophisticated new methods, and, inmany instances, have challenged the premises estab-lished by Boas, perhaps nowhere more intensely thanaround the core concept of "culture." New technolo-gies and field techniques now dominate the field ofarchaeology and physical anthropology. Some, like ra-diocarbon dating, DNA research, and computer dataprocessing, were not even foreseen in Boas' time. Newknowledge, such as the biological anthropologists'use of genetic data, paleoenvironmental research,and the dating of hundreds of excavated prehis-toric sites, altered profoundly the way we now studyancient human migrations and construct cultural as

well as biological interactions. In a broader and morephilosophical sense, both North American and post-Soviet anthropologists have spent the last severalyears engaged in a thorough questioning of themany established dogmas in their professional do-mains; in one instance, reconfiguring a scholarly fieldonce intended to serve the interests of Soviet Marxistdoctrines, in the other—under rubrics broadly labeledas "post-modernism"—challenging anthropology's truthclaims as a positivistic science. Native scholars andpolitical activists have leveled more fundamentalchallenges to many core notions and practices ofanthropology, in some instances arguing that thenon-native observer is incapable of understandingNative culture, in others that such observations arethemselves violations of basic human dignity. Disputesover the proper domain of Native cultural propertiescurrently housed in museums have been particularlycontentious. For nearly two decades, critiques andsoul-searching have reverberated both within andoutside the academy. The Jesup Expedition Centenarythus occurs at a particularly pregnant moment in an-thropology where a backward glance at who we wereand how we have changed might contribute to thelarger debate over who we are now and what wemight become.

TheJesup Expedition centenary conference and thisresulting volume are among the products of a largerinitiative named Jesup 2 in honor of the initial JesupExpedition and aimed at encouraging coordinated re-search activities in the Greater North Pacific Region.Its critical goal is in the dissemination of new knowl-edge, approaches, and perspectives in the study ofcultures through scholarly publications, museum ex-hibits, academic symposia, and public programs.Spearheaded by the Arctic Studies Center at theSmithsonian Institution, these efforts have been car-ried out since 1992 by an informal consortium of schol-ars and institutions (Fitzhugh and Krupnik 2001:7-l 0;see also AAAS 1992; AAA 1993; Fitzhugh 1996; Fitz-hugh and Krupnik 1994; lARPC 1995: 22-24; Vakhtin

L. KENDALL AND I. KRUPNIK

3

1 993). Like the original expedition, Jesup 2 is a holisticenterprise, now sustained by a scattered communityof international scholars who have come together toaddress issues of common interest. Unlike the originalventure, the new Jesup 2 program does not have asingle sponsor but reflects the combined effort of sev-eral institutions. The American Museum of Natural His-tory (AMNH), as the major storehouse of the JesupExpedition's resources and of Franz Boas's legacy inNorth Pacific research, has been a critical resource inthis effort.

Boas and his colleagues collected about half ofthe American Museum's 1 6,755 Northwest Coast arti-facts under the auspices of the Jesup Expedition. Al-though the numbers themselves are noteworthy, it istheir diversity, comprehensiveness, and documenta-tion that make the Jesup Expedition acquisitions sovaluable. The American Museum's Northwest Coastcollection is generally regarded as the world's stron-gest, holding artifacts from every known group andnation in this culture region. For over 100 years, thiscollection has been studied by almost every anthro-pologist, art historian, and historian engaged in researchof any magnitude on the Northwest Coast native cul-tures. As a result of AMNH's first fruitful collaborationwith Russian scholars during the original Jesup Expedi-tion, extensive ethnographic collections were also madein Siberia. These are similarly considered among theworld's richest, particularly with regard to severalgroups in northeast Siberia. Their value was subse-quently boosted by several key scholarly monographson Siberian indigenous peoples published in a series ofjesup Expedition Publications/Memoirs of the AmericanMuseum of Natural History as well as by many otherJesup-based publications promoted by Boas and hiscolleagues (see Krupnik 2001). These collections andnumerous archival materials and photographs nowhoused at the American Museum of Natural Historyconstitute the single richest stock of museum resourceson Native Siberian cultures outside the Russian Fed-eration, if not worldwide.

The role of thejesup Expedition collections in docu-menting and preserving the legacy of Native Siberianpeoples is particularly noteworthy. For many years—infact, for almost all of the 20th century—Siberia wasclosed to American researchers. Thus, for much of theSoviet period, the Jesup Expedition's various collec-tions and publications were the single largest body ofanthropological information on Siberian cultures avail-able to Western researchers. While some hesitant con-tacts with Soviet anthropologists resumed in the late1 950s, it was the Smithsonian Institution's monumen-tal 1980s joint exhibit, Crossroads of Continents: Cul-tures of Siberia and Alaska that finally marked the col-lapse of the barrier that had separated scholars andNative people on both sides of the North Pacific(Fitzhugh and Crowell 1988; Fitzhugh, this volume).The exhibit, produced by a team of North Americanand Russian curators, marked a new era of scholarlycooperation and reawakened awareness of the valueof thejesup Expedition's resources, particularly for andamong Siberian indigenous people.

Since that time, the American Museum of NaturalHistory, the main depository of the JNPE legacy, hasbeen experiencing an unprecedented call on its col-lections and archives. On a single memorable day in1993, Nikolai Vakhtin from St. Petersburg was perus-ing the Expedition's documented chronicle stored inletters and diaries at the Museum archive. In anotherroom, Stephen Ousley, then from the University of Ten-nessee, worked with the Jesup Expedition's biologicaldata; a Danish film-maker examined Yukagir materialsas background to a film project; and a scholar fromJapan researched the Nanay (Cold) and Nivkh (Cilyak)collections from Sakhalin Island and the Amur River.Native Siberian scholars have been prominent amongthe researchers who have made their way to AMNH,beginning with the Sakha ethnologists, Vladimir andZinaida Ivanov-Unarov from Yakutsk. Some of the re-sults of these studies are contained in this volume andelsewhere (V. Ivanov-Unarov and Z. Ivanova-Unarova,this volume; Ousley andjantz 2001; Vakhtin 2001).

4

INTRODUCTION

The Celebration

Given these developments, it seemed both necessaryand appropriate to mark the centenary of the JesupNorth Pacific Expedition with a public acknowledge-ment, assessment, and celebration. In the fall of 1997,the American Museum of Natural History in New Yorkhosted several public events, including an exhibit ofexpedition photographs, Drawing Shadows to Stonecurated by Barbara Mathe and Thomas Ross Miller; aprogram of public lectures; a Greater North Pacific FilmFestival; and performances by Native dance troopsfrom both sides of the Bering Strait. A catalog of sev-eral dozen historical photographs by the JNPE teammembers was published (Kendall et al. 1997), followedby many articles in popular and academic journals. Butthe centerpiece of this celebration, in the spirit of broadscholarly inquiry as embraced by the original expedi-tion, was a five-day international conference. Construct-ing Cultures Then and Now: Celebrating Franz Boas andthe jesup North Pacific Expedition. It brought togetheran impressive team of over 50 internationally-acclaimedscholars, museum curators, and Native cultural work-ers who met face-to-face to discuss the history, cur-rent prospects, and possible futures of the peoples ofthe Greater North Pacific Region.

The conference, featuring the legacy of Franz Boasand the Jesup Expedition, was held at the Museum inNovember 1997, to mark the 1 00-year anniversary ofthe Expedition's first printed report from the field,published in the October 1 897 issue of the journalSc/e/ice (Boas 1 897). The conference built upon Jesup2 projects already initiated by the Smithsonian In-stitution, the American Museum of Natural History,the University of Alaska, the National Science Foun-dation, and the National Park Service, in collabora-tion with numerous partners in Russia, Siberia, Canada,Japan, and Europe. Both the conference and relatedcentenary activities were amply covered by the pressand hailed by the professional anthropological com-munity (Anonymous 1998; Graburn 1998; Kendall1997; Lee 1998; Rexer 1997; Shute 1997).

The centenary conference was one product of ajoint effort by five anthropologists: Laurel Kendall(American Museum of Natural History), Marjory Mandel-stam Balzer (Georgetown University), William Fitzhugh(Arctic Studies Center, Smithsonian Institution), IgorKrupnik (Arctic Studies Center, Smithsonian Institution),and Nikolai Vakhtin (European University, St Petersburg,Russia). The team assembled a broad range of schol-ars and local cultural experts who specialized in stud-ies of peoples and cultures—both modern and prehis-toric—and environments across the Greater North Pa-cific Region. The diversity of their perspectives is re-flected in the twenty conference papers assembled inthis volume.

This team of experts was asked to consider a num-ber of issues in light of contemporary scholarship. Arethe "cultures" as described and consrrwcfet/by the JesupExpedition participants relevant to the emerging newidentities of Native peoples in the region today? Howdo modern culturally conscious peoples reconstitutethemselves, both politically and spiritually? Are therecords of ethnologists, folklorists, and linguists of acentury ago a valuable resource in this transformation?Do museums and museum collections have a role toplay in this process? How do issues of environmentalexploitation play against local sovereignty and lo-cal conceptualizations of the land and its resources?These and other taunting issues necessarily includethe perspectives of Native people and the voicesof Native scholars. Intentionally designed to breakthrough international and interdisciplinary as well asprofessional and political boundaries, this conferenceprovided one lively forum for dialogues that span theBering Strait.

Following Boas' founding vision of anthropologyas an integrated endeavor, the organizers adopted asimilar breadth of vision in defining the conference'sframework as well as in inviting topics for individualpresentations and focused panel discussions. We werealso keenly aware that in the intervening century, manysub-fields once skillfully aligned by Boas have become

L. KENDALL AND L KRUPNIK

5

highly specialized, shifted their boundaries orchangedtheir professional allegiances. The conference presen-tations (recast as chapters in this volume) suggestedhow new knowledge—such as the biologicalanthropologist's use of genetic data, the vastly ex-panded vision of archaeology and comparative his-torical linguistics, or the anthropologist's attention tothe transcontinental colonial flows of goods, ideas,and people—permitted new insights into questionsonce posed by the Jesup Expedition. Several speakersrevealed how very often the work of newly-recruiteddisciples in the science of anthropology, like Boas andhis counterparts, was dependent upon and conse-quently enriched by the insights of local residents, whoacted as their field partners, knowledge experts, guides,and interpreters. Many papers offered moving illustra-tions of how scholars worldwide continue to use ma-terials collected by the Jesup Expedition to pose newquestions. Of particular significance, scholars com-mented on the value of the American Museum of Natu-ral History's material and of the Boasian legacy as in-digenous peoples of the "Jesup area" engage in projectsof cultural revitalization. The full saga of the confer-ence has been described elsewhere (Graburn 1998).

The Volume

The 20 conference papers selected for this volume aredirectly tied to the historical legacy of the Jesup Expe-dition, either by way of centennial reevaluation andcritique of its scientific premises and results or as ademonstration of how the Jesup Expedition's artifactsand data are used today to new ends. We believe thatwith the publication of this "centennial" volume—thesecond volume to be published by the Arctic StudiesCenter on the Jesi^ip 2 theme (cf. Krupnik and Fitzhugh2001) and in conjunction with several other recentmonographs, collections, and catalogs featuring thelegacy of the JNPE and of Franz Boas (Cole 1 999; Fitz-hugh and Chaussonnet 1994; Fitzhugh and Crowell1988; Jacknis 2002; Jonaitis 1 988, 1 991, 1 995, 1 999;Kendall et al. 1997; Krupnik 2000; Shternberg 1999,

etc.)—we have raised a significant milestone on theambitious Journey begun by Franz Boas and his teamover 100 years ago.

The volume is organized into four thematic sec-tions. Papers in the first section, Om Hundred Years ofjesup: The Intellectual Legacy of the Jesup Expedition Era,look back over a century to evaluate the Expeditionfrom the perspective of its impact on the anthropol-ogy of the late 19th and early 20th century ("then") andto re-evaluate its assumptions in light of today's un-derstandings C'moiv"). The Expedition's multi-faceted re-search agenda offers a stimulating and varied "menu"for such a re-examination. The section opens with thechapter by Igor Krupnik and Nikolai Vakhtin, who ex-amine the saga of the Jesup North Pacific Expedition asif it were a modern scholarly project. Though conceivedand executed in a manner consistent with the goalsand techniques of anthropological scholarship circa1 900, the Jesup Expedition, according to Krupnik andVakhtin, meets most of the contemporary criteria ofsuccessful interdisciplinary research by virtue of its wellthought out scientific design, consistent methodologi-cal frame, publication and training agenda, and pro-motion of international scholarly collaboration.

In a more critical vein, Don Dumond concludes thatthe post-Jesup century of work in the archaeology ofthe North Pacific does not, in the main, offer evidencefor one of the key pieces of Boas' ethnogenetic theory,the so-called "Eskimo wedge" hypothesis that as-sumed a late wedge-like intrusion of the Eskimo intothe chain of related cultures in the Bering Sea-BeringStrait area. Under a similar revisionist agenda, PeterSchweitzer queries why Boas' preoccupation with dif-fusion and culture exchange, and his later interest inlocal history never materialized into a focused ethno-history of Native peoples residing at the critical junc-tion of trans-Beringian contacts, the Bering Strait area.Molly Lee and Nelson Graburn suggest that for Boas atthe time of the Jesup Expedition (then), the diffusion ofmaterial and non-material cultural traits was as muchof an exciting intellectual paradigm as the concept of

6

INTRODUCTION

"transnationalism" is for students of global cultural ex-change today (now). They argue that Boas' diffusionistagenda erred in excising from his consideration theimpact of international commerce on cultural exchangeswithin the region. Finally, the AMNH team of Stanleyand Ruth Fried and Leila Williamson compares the JesupExpedition's logistics, planning, and research focus tosimilarly monumental enterprises, such as the Lewisand Clark Expedition (1 803-06), the U.S. Exploring Ex-pedition (1838-42), and the Cambridge Anthropologi-cal Expedition to the Torres Straits (1898-99).

Part Two, Anthropologies and Histories: Jesup Mem-bers TInen and Now, broadens our understanding of keyparticipants in the Expedition and related fieldwork. IraJacknis illuminates an intriguing aspect of Boas' multi-faceted personality, his musical skill and deep love ofmusic, which led him to undertake musicological re-search in the field. Other chapters in this section revealmany instances where the work of Boas and his coun-terparts was dependent upon and consequently en-riched by the insights of local people, both Native andlong-term local residents, thus broadening our under-standing of such collaborations beyond the well-docu-mented relationship of Boas and George Hunt who isrecognized today as an early Native anthropologist(Berman 1996). These papers suggest that today's an-thropologists would benefit by more research and soulsearching as to how our scholarly predecessors hadtypically incorporated the work of their local associ-ates into their own academic publications. WendyWickwire focuses on one of Boas' longest-standing andmost productive local collaborators in Northwest Coastethnography, James Teit, who—despite his voluminouscontributions to the JNPE research and publications—has been commonly regarded as merely Boas' "fieldassistant." Koichi Inoue examines an uneasy narrativeof another contemporary "local" scientist, BronislawPilsudski, an enthusiastic and ethnographically astutePolish exile living on Sakhalin Island whose brief careerintersected with the work of three members of theJesup Expedition team: Boas, Laufer, and Shternberg.

Nora Marks Dauenhauer and Richard Dauenhauer ex-plore the legacy of Louis Shotridge, the first Tlingit,and possibly the first Northwest Coast Native, withtraining in linguistics and anthropology (primarily fromBoas). The first Native Alaskan to become a profes-sional collector and museum curator, Shotridge madeinvaluable and generally under-recognized contribu-tions to the documentation of the Northwest Coastcultures. Finally, Sergei Kan engages in ethnohistoricaldetective work to retrieve a pattern of collaborationbetween the late 19th-century ethnographers and lo-cal Native American and "mixed-blood" (Creole, Metis)interpreters, amateur historians, and informants. Hedraws on his extensive research on Native-outsider in-teractions in southern Alaska during the late 1 800s.

Part Three, People, Animals, and Land: A Jesup ThemeRevisited, offers a selection of modern perspectives byscholars whose disciplines span the major fields of theJesup Expedition's activities. Robert Hoffmann describesthe biological and natural history work of the JNPE asan early example of the "correlated" multi-disciplinaryefforts that would characterize modern scientific ex-peditions. He offers a sober assessment of biologicaldiversity in the Beringian region today, arguing thatsuch correlated efforts are urgently needed if theregion's endangered ecology is to be preserved.Michael Krauss indexes shortcomings in the Expe-dition's efforts to document North Pacific languages,attributing this to a lack of interest on the part of Ex-pedition scientists in either the documentation of lin-guistic diversity or the last-minute salvage of dyinglanguages through extensive recording in the interestof comparative linguistics or philological study. AsKrauss argues, only Boas appears to have given muchpriority to that latter task, and even he mostly neglectedit during his brief Jesup Expedition fieldwork.

Theodore Schurr and Douglas Wallace describe howmodern molecular genetic data obtained from aborigi-nal populations provide an exciting cross-disciplinarytool to test the old theories of the Jesup Expeditionera, a tool which could not have even been imagined

L. KENDALL AND I. KRUPNIK

7

by the original JNPE members. They argue that suchdata can be used successfully to test the original JNPEhypotheses regarding the origins and diversity of Na-tive Siberians and their close evolutionary relationshipswith Native Americans. The chapter by Sergei Arutiunovrecords generational transitions within the Russianschool of Northeast Siberian prehistoric research; it alsooffers some new insights on the scenarios of the earli-est trans-Beringian interactions based upon methodsand approaches that were similarly not even envisionedat the time of the Jesup Expedition (such as the studyof prehistoric adaptations; comparative historical lin-guistics; and analysis of dental features of the prehis-toric and modern populations). Finally, David Koesterdeals with the traumatic consequences of history, un-veiling the drama of involuntary relocations and forcedseparation of indigenous people from their ancestrallands during the "post-Jesup" era. "History" here is notquantifiable molecular or archaeological data, siftedfrom a perspective of distance, but the stuff of memoryand sentiment as revealed in the stories and poetry ofthe "lost villages" of Kamchatka.

The last section of this volume. Curators, Collec-tors, and Consumers, describes some of the ways inwhich JNPE and other North Pacific museum resourceshave become part of local efforts to sustain the cul-tural heritage of the indigenous peoples of the GreaterNorth Pacific Region. William W. Fitzhugh brings to lightmany memories, both sweet and sad, as well as theintricacies of a 20 year-long effort in trans-national mu-seum cooperation, publication, and outreach that cul-minated in the exhibit Crossroads of Continents: Cul-tures of Siberia and Alaska (1988-92) and its follow-uptraveling venture. Crossroads Alaska-Siberia{] 993-97).Stephen Loring and Douglas Veltre share the same vi-sion of the changing role of anthropology (and archae-ology, in particular) in protecting and enhancing cul-tural heritage, describing their own research contribu-tions in the Aleutian Islands.

In the same collaborative spirit, two art historiansand ethnographers from Russia's Sakha Republic

(Yakutia), Zinaida Ivanova-Unarova and the late VladimirIvanov-Unarov (1937-2000) offer a moving accountof a personal Journey undertaken from the Siberianheartland to work with collections at the AmericanMuseum of Natural History in New York and then sharethe results of their study with Native artisans backhome. Their story demonstrates how materials col-lected by the original Jesup Expedition offer invaluableencouragement to the people engaged in cultural re-vival and revitalization efforts today. Aldona Jonaitislooks at many intricate aspects of a related process:the reclaiming of a traditional cultural legacy by inno-vative Native artists, including female artists, who areconstructing new cultural symbols. She uses the caseof a totem pole, the quintessential symbol of the North-west Coast cultures, and the example of two contem-porary female carvers to illustrate how the early an-thropological notion of Native art's "timeless tradition-alism" has been turned on its head by the creativity ofliving Native cultures of today. In what could be readas a coda to the entire volume, Kwakwaka'wakw an-thropologist and curatorCloriaCranmer Webster writesa highly personal essay as the granddaughter of GeorgeHunt whose collaboration with Franz Boas made animportant contribution not only to the ethnographicrecord, but to the preservation of Kwakwaka'wakwculture. She presents the story of a long friendshipbetween the Boas and Hunt families constructedthrough Kwakwaka'wakw idioms of name-giving andfeasting, an evocation of important "grandfathers" andthe inspiration they offer future generations.

Acknowledgments

The Jesup Expedition Centenary Conference of 1997was supported by The Henry Luce Foundation, Inc.,The Ford Foundation, The Rockefeller Foundation, TheTrust for Mutual Understanding, Wenner-Gren Founda-tion for Anthroplogical Research, and the Chi-Mei Cul-tural Foundation. Ann Fitzgerald coordinated the com-plex logistics of an international conference, and AMNHstaff, including Ann Wright-Parsons and Alexia Bloch,

8

INTRODUCTION

then with the AMNH Department of Anthropology,ensured that events ran smoothly. We are particularlygrateful to the many museum volunteers who offeredassistance before and during the conference and to ateam of tireless interpreters provided by the Transla-tion Center, Columbia University.

The story of this volume's preparation offers anilluminating lesson that the publishing difficulties theJNPE team encountered 100 years ago still exist to-day. It was also an example of a successful institu-tional partnership, quite in the footsteps of the originalJNPE venture. Laurel Kendall spearheaded initial edito-rial work on the volume at AMNH, following the 1997centennial conference. Kathryn A. Malm helped editthis ambitious bundle of papers into a cohesive manu-script. Eventually, the Arctic Studies Center (ASC) pickedup this collection under its recently established publi-cation series, Contributions to Circumpoiar Anthropol-ogy, that had previously featured another jesup 2 vol-ume, Gateways. Exploring the Legacy of the Jesup NorthPacific Expedition, 1897-1902 (Krupnik and Fitzhugh2001). The publication of both volumes was madepossible in part by an endowment from the late an-thropologist James W. VanStone (1925-2001), whowas himself an inspiring symbol of partnership and in-ter-disciplinary collaboration in Arctic and North Pa-cific ethnological research.

At the ASC, Igor Krupnik and Iris Hahn carried onthe editorial work while Elisabeth Ward supervisedthe process of layout and printing of the manuscript.Marcia Bakry at the Smithsonian Institution's Depart-ment of Anthropology and Tam Thompson offeredinvaluable assistance with graphic artwork. This col-lection follows a design pattern created by AnyaVinokour for the ASC Contributions to CircumpoiarAnthropology series and used for the preceding pub-lications. We would like to commend all our volumecontributors for their trust, dedication, as well as forpatience during a seemingly interminable editorialprocess. Special thanks go to Stanley Freed at theAMNH, William Fitzhugh, the ASC Director, and to

Katherine Rusk for their helpful comments and editorialsuggestions to many volume papers at this final stage.

This book, as well as the preceding Jesup 2 volume(ibid), is illustrated with numerous original photographsfrom the Jesup Expedition era, including many takenby the expedition field crews in Siberia and NorthAmerica. We are grateful to the expedition's host insti-tution, the American Museum of Natural History, forpermission to reproduce the photographs and to Bar-bara Mathe, Head of Special Collections at the AMNHLibrary, for her truly heartfelt assistance with the im-ages. Several more illustrations, including historicalphotographs and images of ethnographic objects,come from other collections, such as that of theSmithsonian Institution's National Anthropological Ar-chives, National Museum of Natural History, NationalMuseum of the American Indian; the University of Penn-sylvania Museum, University of Alaska Museum, AlaskaState Library, American Philosophical Society, BritishColumbia Provincial Archives, University of British Co-lumbia Museum of Anthropology, Royal British Colum-bia Museum, and others (see List of Illustrations). Wethank all institutions as well as the curators, collectionmanagement staff, and archivists who granted us per-mission and assisted in selecting and securing the illus-trations for this second JNPE memorial volume.

Finally, over the years since the initial New Yorkconference of 1997, we have lost one of the mostdevoted members of the Jesup 2 team, the Sakha(Yakut) ethnologist and art historian Vladimir Ivanov-Unarov, who passed away in 2000. We regard thisvolume as a special tribute to Volodya's legacy—whichis honored here by Marjorie Mandelstam Balzer—aswell as to other colleagues and partners who did notlive to see the Jesup Expedition's centenary and totake part in its celebration.

Note

1. The original wax cylinder sound record-ings produced during the Jesup Expedition wereeventually transferred to the Archives of TraditionalMusic at the University of Indiana.

L. KENDALL AND \. KRUPNIK

9

References

AAA (American Anthropological Association)

1 993 Gateways to Jesup II: Evaluating Archival Re-sources of thejesup North Pacific Expedition, 1897-1902. In American Anthropological Association AnnualMeeting, 92, Abstracts. Pp. 40-1. Washington, DC.AAAS (American Association for the Advance-ment of Science)

1 992 Arctic Research Repeats History. Science

256:163.Anonymous

1 998 The Shadows of a Human Science. The New

York 7/mes, January 29, p. A-22.Berman, Judith

1 996 "The Culture as it appears to the Indian Him-self: Boas, George Hunt, and the Methods of Eth-nography. In Volksgeist as Method and Ethic: Essayson Boasian Ethnography and the German Anthropologi-cal Tradition. George W. Stocking, Jr., ed. Pp. 215-56. History of Anthropology, 8. Madison: Universityof Wisconsin Press.

Boas, Franz

1 897 The Jesup Expedition to the North Pacific Coast.

Science, U.S., W 95): 535-38.Cole, Douglas

1999 Franz Boas: The Early Years, 1858-1906.Vancouver: Douglas & Mclntyre; Seattle: Universityof Washington Press.

Cole, Douglas, and Alex Long

2001 The Boasian Anthropological Survey Tradition.The Role of Franz Boas in North American Anthropo-logical Surveys. In Surveying the Record. North Ameri-can Scientific Exploration to 1930. Edward C. Carter II,ed. Pp. 225^9. Memoirs of the American Philosophi-cal Society, 231. Philadelphia: American Philosophi-cal Society.

Fitzhugh, William W.

1 996 Jesup 2: Anthropology of the North Pacific.

Northern Notes 4:4]-62. Hanover, N.H.Fitzhugh, William W., and Valerie Chaussonnet,eds.

1 994 Anthropology of the North Pacific Rim. Wash-ington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press.Fitzhugh, William W., and Aron Crowell, eds.

1 988 Crossroads of Continents: Cultures of Siberiaand Alaska.Washington, DC: Smithsonian InstitutionPress.

Fitzhugh, William W., and Igor Krupnik

1 994 Thejesup II Research Initiative: Anthropologi-cal Studies in the North Pacific. Arctic Studies CenterNewsletter. (Jesup II Newsbrief). Washington, DC: Arc-tic Studies Center, Smithsonian Institution.

2001 Introduction. In Gateways. Exploring the Legacyof the Jesup North Pacific Expedition, 1897-1902. IgorKrupnik and William W. Fitzhugh, eds. Pp. 1 -16. Con-

tributions to Circumpolar Anthropology, 1. Washing-ton, DC: Arctic Studies CenterGraburn, Nelson H. H.

1 998 Constructing Cultures Then and Now. Ameri-can Anthropologist 100(4): 1009-1 3.lARPC (Interagency Arctic Research PolicyCommittee)

1995 U.S. Arctic Research Plan Biennial Revision:1 996-2000. Arctic Research of the United States 9(Spring).

Jacknis, Ira

2002 The Storage Box of Tradition: KwakiutI Art, An-thropologists, and Museums, 1881-1981. Washing-ton, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press.

Jonaitis, Aldona

1988 From the Land of the Totem Poles. The North-west Coast Indian Art Collection at the American Mu-seum of Natural History. Seattle: University of Wash-ington Press; New York: American Museum of Natu-ral History.

1 999 The Yuquot Whalers'Shrine. Seattle: University

of Washington Press.Jonaitis, Aldona, ed.

1991 Chiefly Feasts. The Enduring KwakiutI Potlach.

Seattle: University of Washington Press; New York:

American Museum of Natural History.1 995 A Wealth of Thought: Franz Boas on Native

American Art. Seattle: University of Washington Press.Kendall, Laurel

1997 Thejesup North Pacific Expedition. Rotunda

22(10):!. New York.Kendall, Laurell, Barbara Mathe, and Thomas R.Miller, eds.

1997 Drawing Shadows to Stone: The Photography ofthe Jesup North Pacific Expedition, 1897-1902. NewYork: American Museum of Natural History; Seattle:University of Washington Press.

Krupnik, Igor

2000 Jesup-2: The Precious Legacy and a Centen-nial Perspective. European Review of Native AmericanStudies 14(2), Special Issue.

2001 A Jesup Bibliography: Tracking the Publishedand Archival Legacy of the Jesup Expedition. In Gate-ways. Exploring the Legacy of the Jesup North PacificExpedition, 1897-1902. Igor Krupnik and William W.Fitzhugh, eds. Pp. 297-316. Contributions to Circum-polar Anthropology, 1. Washington, DC: Arctic Stud-ies Center.

Krupnik, Igor, and William W. Fizthugh, eds.

2001 Gateways. Exploring the Legacy of the JesupNorth Pacific Expedition, 1897-1902. Contributionsto Circumpolar Anthropology, 1. Washington, DC: Arc-tic Studies Center, Smithsonian Institution.

Lee, Molly

1 998 Exhibition Review: Drawing Shadows to Stone.American Anthropologist 100(4): 1005-09.

INTRODUCTION

Miller, Thomas Ross, and Barbara Mathe

1 997 Drawing Shadows to Stone. In Drawing Shad-ows to Stone: The Photography of the Jesup North Pa-cific Expedition, ]897-]902. Laurel Kendall, BarbaraMathe, and Thomas Ross Miller, eds. Pp. 1 9-42. NewYork: American Museum of Natural History; Seattle:University of Washington Press.

Ousley, Stephen, and Richard Jantz

2001 500 Year Old Questions, 1 00 Year Old Data,Brand New Computers: Biological Data from the JesupNorth Pacific Expedition. In Gateways. Exploring theLegacy of the Jesup North Pacific Expedition, 1897-1902. Igor Krupnik and William W. Fitzhugh, eds.Pp.257-78. Contributions to Circumpolar Anthropol-ogy, 1. Washington, DC: Arctic Studies Center.

Rexer, Lyie

1 997 Doctoring Reality to Document What's True.

The New Yorl< Times, November 9, p.25.Sanjek, Roger.

1 996 Franz Boas. In Encyclopedia of Social and Cul-tural Anthropology. Alan Barnard and Jonathan Spen-cer, eds. Pp. 7]-4. London: Routledge.

Shternberg, Lev,

1 999 The Social Organization of the Cilyak. BruceGrant, ed. Anthropological Papers of the AmericanMuseum of Natural History, 82. New York: AmericanMuseum of Natural History.

Shute, Nancy

1997 Birth of a Science, Rebirth of a People. TheJesup Expedition Turns 100. U.S. News & World Re-port. December 1, p.64.

Vakhtin, Nikolai B.

1993 Jesup-2: Novaia programma sotsial'no-antropologicheskikh issledovanii na Severe Qesup-2: A New Program of Social and AnthropologicalResearch in the North). Kunstkamera. Ethnograficheskietetradi 1:21 1-1 3. St. Petersburg.

2001 Franz Boas and the Shaping of the Jesup Ex-pedition Siberian Research, 1895-1900. In Gateways.Exploring the Legacy of the Jesup North Pacific Expedi-tion, 1897-1902. Igor Krupnik and William W.Fitzhugh, eds. Pp.71-89. Contributions to Circum-polar Anthropology, 1. Washington, DC: Arctic Stud-ies Center.

L. KENDALL AND \. KRUPNIK

3/LevShternberg, Franz Boas, and Waldemar Bogoras at the 21" International Congress of Americanists, 1924.Courtesy of the Museum Anthropology and Ethnography, St. Petersburg, Russia (original in the MAE collection)

100 YEARS AFTER JESUP: THE INTELLECTUAL LEGACYOF THEJESUP EXPEDITION ERA

"*y"he /\im of the Expedition...Mas in theMain ^een /Xccompiishec!"

Words, [^eeJs, and Legacies of the Jesup |\jorti-i f acific Expedition

IGOR KRUPNIK

AND NIKOLAI VAKHTIN

The Jesup North Pacific Expedition (JNPE), which tookplace from 1897 to 1902, was a milestone event forthe entire domain of North Pacific/Siberian/North Ameri-can research. To the field currently known as "Jesup-2studies" (Fitzhugh and Krupnik 2001) as well as to theexpedition's host institution, the American Museum ofNatural History (AMNH), the Expedition's recent cen-tennial and the many accompanying events offered aremarkable opportunity to evaluate key componentsof its legacy, and to review transitions in anthropol-ogy and human sciences over the turbulent 20th cen-tury.

By modern standards, JNPE was a pioneer scientificventure. It initiated a new pattern of large anthropo-logical/museum surveys, with 1 7 team members fromfour countries (the U.S., Russia, Canada, and Germany)working in various combinations over five years ontwo continents.' The expedition's fieldwork wasmatched by an equally ambitious publication program.A preliminary JesL^p Bibliography compiled recently(Krupnik 2001) lists about 200 publications producedby JNPE participants over 50 years, including elevenmajor volumes and dozens of journal articles, and col-lections of folklore and language materials.

For 100 years following the JNPE, its design, out-comes, and publications have been reviewed manytimes (Freed et al. 1 988; Fitzhugh and Krupnik 2001;Kuz'mina 1994; Vakhtin 1993; Fitzhugh 1996). It hasbeen called "a grandiose, brilliantly conceptualized, andmasterfully orchestrated attack on one of the most

important problems in American anthropology" (Fitz-hugh and Crowell 1988:14), one that initiated "a trans-valuation of the entire field of anthropology, and hintedat its development into the most humane of the hu-man sciences" Conaitis 1988:213). But the JNPE wasalso labeled a "remarkable failure," a "disappointmentfor Morris K. Jesup and for his museum" (Cole 2001:48)or, at least, a "fiasco" in some of its fields of activities,areas surveyed, and/or postulated hypotheses. Theseconflicting perspectives are illustrated in many papersin this volume.

Many shortcomings of the Jesup Expedition projecthave been well addressed, since the JNPE team and,particularly, its leader, Franz Boas, neither produced asummary project monograph nor offered any extendedoutline of cultural history of the North Pacific Region.There are more than ample grounds for critique andrevisionism (see chapters by Dumond; Lee and Graburn;Hoffmann; Inoue; Krauss; Schweitzer, this volume; alsoOusley 2000; Ousley and Jantz 2001). As a monumen-tal initiative conducted by many strong personalities,the Jesup Expedition can be judged from various per-spectives, according to the often conflicting visions ofits organizers, sponsors, and individual team members.Some of these visions were openly debated in papersand letters; others have been personal and remainedhidden. While certain JNPE initial plans did materialize,many more were abandoned during or after the field-work was completed. In addition, the JNPE legacy en-dured a long period of criticism during the 1 920s and

1 5

1930s, followed by decades of skepticism and aban-donment (Krupnik I 998). It was not until recently thatthe Expedition's legacy underwent a more balancedjudgment and a spectacular recovery (see various chap-ters in Krupnik and Fitzhugh 2001).

This paper introduces a new framework to con-sider the legacy of the JNPE project by testing it againstsome basic evaluation criteria commonly applied tolarge research initiatives in contemporary social sci-ence. By no means do we aspire to assume the role ofpresent-day "peer reviewers" for a century-old venture.Rather we would like to illustrate how the Jesup Expe-dition agenda, its field logistics, and publication planaccomplished then can be viewed now in a centennialperspective. For this purpose, we have selected fivemodern evaluation criteria: research integrity; contri-bution to "basic science"; international cooperation;education and training; and public outreach. These cri-teria are familiar to every modern social scientist. Byapplying today's standards to the original JNPE project,we deliberately contemporize its entire context in or-der to build a new vision of its legacy a century later.

Integrity of the JNPE Design

Despite the expedition's complex design and its nu-merous achievements, it is clear that the JNPE projectput forth a somewhat confusing message from thevery start. It seemed to have been "packaged" andpresented differently to various constituencies and pro-spective audiences. In his articles, statements, and let-ters, Franz Boas, the project leader, delivered at leastthree different perspectives on the general goals ofthe JNPE, to say nothing of his many personal objec-tives revealed through his private correspondence.

The first declared objective of the JNPE was its fo-cus on extensive ethnographic surveys and collecting.Boas advertised it as "[a] systematic exploration ofthe cultures and languages of the peoples inhabitingthe coasts of the North Pacific Ocean between theAmoor River [sic] in Asia and Columbia River in America"(Anonymous 1897:455; Boas 1898a:4). This objective

was fulfilled with astounding success (Figs. 1 -2, 7-1 0).One can feel the breadth of the JNPE efforts in Bogoras'exuberant report on the outcome of his year-long fieldwork in Siberia (1900-01) as quoted by Boas:

[T]he results of this work are studies of theethnography and anthropology of theChukchee and Asiatic Eskimo, and partly ofthe Kamchadal and of the Pacific Koryak.These studies are illustrated by extensivecollections, embracing five thousand ethno-graphical objects, thirty-three plaster castsof faces, seventy-five skulls and archaeologi-cal specimens from abandoned village sitesand from graves. Other materials obtainedinclude three hundred tales and traditions;one hundred-fifty texts in the Chukchee,Koryak, Kamchadal, and Eskimo languages;dictionaries and grammatical sketches ofthese languages; ninety-five phonographicrecords, and measurements of eight hundred-sixty individuals [the latter done mainly byMr. Axelrod in addition to some 770 photo-graphs—I.K., N.V.]. I also made zoologicalcollection and kept a meteorological journalduring the whole time of my field-work (Boas1903:1 1 5).

Despite a few gaps in the proposed itinerary and studyarea, the expedition mostly followed its initial five-yearresearch plan as designed by Boas in 1897. This planwas presented very early in a form of a map, "Field ofProposed Operations of the Jesup North Pacific Expedi-tion." It was enclosed to the Annual Report of the AMNHPresident Morris Jesup on the activities of the museumduring the year 1 897 (Fig.4; Jesup 1898; Krupnik andFitzhugh 2001 :xvi). This early blueprint for the JNPE five-year field operation reveals a remarkable agreementwith the actual surveys conducted by the expedition'steams between the years 1 897 and 1 902. The onlyexception was the fieldwork in western and southernAlaska (that never materialized) and on the AleutianIslands. The latter was undertaken several years laterby Waldemar and Dina Jochelson under a differentproject, the Ryabushinski Expedition of the RussianGeographical Society in 1909-11. The Alaska Yup'ikand Inupiat Eskimo as well the Tlingit were droppedfrom the initial research plan. According to Boas, thiswas done deliberately, in view of the recently pub-

100 YEARS/ EVALUATING ACCOMPLISHMENTS

lished monographs or the then ongoing studies byEdward W. Nelson, John IVlurdoch, and George T.Emmons (Boas 1903:77).

However, several later surveys, such as John Swan-ton's study of the Tlingit in 1904, Harlan Smith's trip tothe Columbia River valley in 1903, and the Jochelsons'trip to the Aleutians and Kamchatka in 1909-11, wereconducted as direct extensions of the main exped-

scientific achievement, particularly if one considers thedistances and communication problems involved. Onehas to acknowledge, however, that individual JNPEsurveys of certain areas and Native groups were quiteunequal in terms of the time invested and ethnographicdata collected (see critical reviews in chapters by Krauss,Inoue, Schweitzer, and Wickwire, this volume; also Cole2001; Krupnik 1996).

1897

1898

1900

1901

4/Field of Proposed Operations of the Jesup North Pacific Expedition, 1898 (adapted from American Museumof Natural History, Annual Report of the President for the Year 1897)

ition's field operations of 1897-1902. With this, theJNPE team members almost completed their announcedobjective to cover the area "from the Amoor River inAsia and up to Columbia Valley in North America." Al-together, the expedition field crews suPv/eyed 1 7 Na-tive nations on the Northwest Coast^ and 10 nationsin Siberia.^ The task of supervising and coordinatingthis Joint field plan of many individual researchersand field teams over several years was successfullyaccomplished by Franz Boas, the JNPE's relentless leader.It was and still remains an outstanding logistical and

As a result of these efforts, the map of Native na-tions of Northeast Siberia and Northwestern NorthAmerica was significantly amended. The AmericanMuseum of Natural History garnered fabulous ethno-graphic and natural science collections that werequickly put on display in its exhibit halls, which weresubsequently redesigned and expanded (Anonymous1904a, 1904b; Jonaitis 1988; Fig. 11). Several ethno-graphic objects were true masterpieces of Native art,ceremonialism, and ritual practices (Jonaitis 1988, 1991).The JNPE ethnographic and zoological collections (see

I. KRUPNIK AND N. VAKHTIN

Hoffmann, this volume) were matched by the invalu-able folklore, linguistic, and anthropometric data aswell as by the unique historical photography of Nativepeople and local landscapes of Siberia and Northwest-ern North America (Kendall et al. 1997; Willey 2001).And finally, albeit not as quickly as originally adver-tised, the JNPE did produce basic ethnographic mono-graphs and the core folklore and linguistic data formost of the Native nations of the North Pacific. Of those,several Jesup Expedition volumes, like Bogoras' three-part monograph on the Chukchi (Bogoras 1904-9) andJochelson's study of the Koryak Oochelson 1908), re-mained the most complete reference ethnographiesand folklore collections on these peoples over the en-tire 20th century, despite generations of subsequentanthropological research.

The JNPE was far less successful in its second de-clared objective, "the [s]tudy of the early history of thenative races of the North American continent and theirrelation to the Old World" (Anonymous 1897:456; Boas1903:91). This, we believe, was more a public-rela-tions statement or an appealing project title, similar to"the origins of the American race" (see Boas 1898a:4-5). Most probably, it was masterminded to attract publicinterest and to generate funding and institutional sup-port for the JNPE venture. Such a 'public-relations' taskwas, in fact, splendidly achieved, at least during earlierstages of the project (Vakhtin 2001:74-5). Nonethe-less, the issue of the early peopling of the Americasnever fully engaged Boas or most otherJNPE members.Boas himself disclaimed it quite frankly in some of hisprivate letters (e.g. Boas to McChee, April 12, 1897),as he was quite skeptical about the utility of archaeo-logical and osteological materials for any large-scalereconstruction of prehistory (cf.Jacknis 1996: 203).

In fact, such an objective was all but impossible tofulfill at that time due to the infancy of contemporaryarchaeological research and to its very limited techni-cal and analytical capabilities. The time depth of thepeopling of the Americas from Northern Asia, as wellas the chronological span of the prehistory of the North-

1 8

west Coast and Siberia, was still primarily guesswork.No reliable chronology had existed for this part of theworld by the year 1900, nor was there any technicalmeans available to build such a chronology. WilliamDall (1877:93-5) argued for a prehistoric crossing onice at the Bering Strait, presumably during the "Ice Age"period. Several other contemporary scientists favoredmigration or migrations over a land bridge during aninterglacial retreat sometime between 10,000 and100,000 years ago (cf. Wilmsen 1965:1 77-8).

To make things worse, comparative archaeologi-cal collections from both Siberia and North Americawere all but missing, and the limited budget and dura-tion of the JNPE was too modest, if not totally inad-equate, for the task. Harlan Smith, who almost single-handedly carried out JNPE archaeological surveys onthe North American side, found no evidence of distinc-tive cultures dating to the time of the "original migra-tion" (Thom 2001). His limited work, however, was re-garded as "[p]atently inadequate to help to clear thecause of Early Man in America" (Wilmsen 1965:1 78). AJNPE archaeological survey in the Amur River valley inSiberia provided even fewer results. No doubt, it wasdeclared a "failure" even by the very person, whomBoas put in charge of it (Fowke 1906:297). It came asno surprise that the JNPE field operation produced hardlyany legacy for the study of early human migrationsfrom Asia to America and of the prehistory of the "(Na-tive) American race," in particular.

Contribution to "Basic Science"

It was the third stated objective of the JNPE that gen-erated major controversy, and it also contributed tothe bulk of later criticism aimed at Boas and theexpedition's overall accomplishments. Boas framedthis objective as "[exploring] what relations the nativetribes on the two sides of the North Pacific bear toeach other, and particularly what influence the inhabit-ants of one continent may have exerted on those ofthe other...[w]ith a view to discovering as much aspossible of their history" (Boas 1903:76).

100 YEARS/ EVALUATING ACCOMPLISHMENTS

TheJNPE members advanced three basic concepts,in this regard, during and after the expedition field-work (see Boas 1903, 1910/2001), in developing thegeneral scenario of the peopling of the Americas fromNortheast Asia via the Bering Sea area. All three con-cepts addressed the issue of similarities between cul-tures on both sides of the North Pacific. These include:

1. The so-called "Americanoidtheory'thai claimedan American origin of certain Paleoasiatic groupsin Northeastern Siberia, such as the Chukchi,Koryak, Kamchadal (Itelmen), and the Yukagir (seereviews in Ousley 2000; Ousley and Jantz 2001)

2. The "Eskimo Wedge" theory that suggested arelatively late arrival of the Eskimo to the NorthPacific area that subsequently bisected the onceunbroken continuum of the Siberian"Americanoid" and Northwest Coast AmericanIndian groups (see review in Dumond, thisvolume).

3. The idea of a fundamental cultural and physicalgap between the North Pacific coastal ("salt-water") nations and their inland neighbors, likethe Tungus, the Yakut (Sakha), and the PlateauIndian groups (such as Thompson, Shuswap, andothers) in Siberia and North America, respectively.

These three paradigms were to become the pillars ofthe JNPE and Boas' approach to North Pacific cultural(pre)history. In fact, they were advanced very early inthe project, well before the entire corpus of the ex-pedition's ethnographic, anthropometric, and linguis-tic data was processed and published (Anonymous1897:455; Boas 1898a:4, 1902/1940:526-9, 1903:115, 1905:98-9; Bogoras 1 902:579-80; Jochelson1904:414,425; Ousley and Jantz 2001:264-5, 275).Later field data and publications notwithstanding, thesehypotheses remained basically intact, and they wererecycled repeatedly over decades in many post-JNPEpapers (cf. Boas 1928, 1 933; Jochelson 1926, 1928).

By 1925, the rapidly growing body of new dataand theories challenged most of the old Jesup Exped-ition's scenarios in Arctic/Eskimo/North Pacific prehis-tory. The main challenge came from the progress in

Eskimo archaeology in the Bering Strait area and in theCanadian Arctic (Krupnik 1998:203). New scenariosfor ancient cultural connections in the circumpolar areabecame popular; they featured circumpolar rather thanthe Beringian/trans-North Pacific venues of cultural in-fluences and migrations. Renewed interest in moresouthern lines of cultural exchange between the North-west Coast and the Amur River area, including Japan,China, and inner Asia has been expressed by youngercohorts of scholars, including students of the originalJNPE team (Krupnik 1998:203).

During the 1930s, criticism of the old JNPE para-digms was mounting from many directions. It was,however, the spectacular advance in North Pacific/Arc-tic archaeology—the field that was the least devel-oped at the time of the JNPE surveys of 1 897-1 902—that eventually toppled its major theories in North Pa-cific cultural origins and connections (see Dumond, thisvolume). But it still gave the work of the expeditionapproximately twenty to twenty-five years of "theo-retical pre-eminence" in the field.

Nevertheless, the core Jesup Expedition vision ofthe arc of the North Pacific coastland of Siberia andNorthwest North America as an integrated culture areahas endured for decades. This perspective was used inmany later studies of the mid-1900s (e.g., Leroi-Gourhan1946; Heizer 1943), and it has been revitalized in nu-merous anthropological, archaeological, andpaleoenvironmental projects, publications, and majormuseum exhibits of the last three decades under suchnames as Beringia, The North Pacific Rim, The GreaterNorth Pacific Area, etc. (Fitzhugh and Crowell 1988;Fitzhugh and Chaussonnet 1994; Fitzhugh 1996; Fitz-hugh and Krupnik 2001; Hopkins 1967; Hopkins et al.1982; Krupnik and Inoue 2003; Michael and VanStone1983; Turner 1988; West 1981, 1996). Similarly, thecornerstone of the JNPE methodological approach alsosustained—matching data on Native customs, folklore,languages, physical types, material objects, and un-earthed archaeological remains—to prove the age-oldcultural connections.

I. KRUPNIK AND N. VAKHTIN

With its emphasis upon an interdisciplinary ap-proach, the JNPE laid the foundation for the many domi-nant patterns and paradigms in the Arctic/North Pa-cific anthropology of the 20th century. Since "Jesuptimes" it has become a deep conviction that the sagaof North Pacific cultural history could be successfullyunveiled only by the concerted teamwork of field andmuseum ethnography, linguistics, physical anthropol-ogy, and archaeology. The recent re-evaluation of manyof the expedition's outcomes, publications, and col-lections will, we hope, rejuvenate certain componentsof the JNPE legacy. Old theories often make a surpris-ing comeback as new research technologies becomeavailable to test and challenge earlier studies.

International Cooperation as the JNPE Legacy

One key field in which the JNPE made an unquestionedand lasting contribution was international cooperationin North Pacific fieldwork, academic contacts, museumexchanges, and cultural research. By its very design,the JNPE project pioneered a new format of coordi-nated and simultaneous cross-boundary anthropologi-cal and museum research by the nationals and institu-tions of the U.S., Russia, Canada, and Germany. It alsoestablished for the first time the now common prac-tice of concerted and highly coordinated use of inter-national gatherings as long-term meeting places, pre-sentation, and publication venues. And finally, it pro-duced a model for a publication series of several suc-cessive volumes, with former team workers of differ-ent origin, country of residence, and affiliation, whodelivered their contribution in a prescribed publicationformat over several years.''

The JNPE operation in British Columbia in 1 897 wasstarted as a continuation of previous research and itfollowed a shared program supported by the AMNHand the British Association of the Advancement ofSciences (Boas 1898a:7-8). The five years of fieldworkin Siberia (1898-1902) were carried out with the fullcooperation and direct involvement of the RussianAcademy of Sciences and of its Permanent Secretary,

Prof. Vasily Radloff. Radloff secured a Siberian travelpermit for Berthold Laufer in 1898 (Cole 2001:36; Freedet al. 1988) and he introduced Jochelson and, later,Bogoras to Boas as prospective Siberian team mem-bers, who, in turn, introduced Leo Shternberg to Boasas a potential contributor to the JNPE publication se-ries (Kan 2001:225-7; Vakhtin 2001:76-83). The offi-cial backing of the JNPE operations in Siberia by theRussian Academy and by Radloff, who also served asthe director of the Academy's Museum of Anthropol-ogy and Ethnography (MAE) in St. Petersburg, was cru-cial in many aspects, including permission for travelingin the field, getting support of the local officials, andshipping collections across and out of Siberia (Figs.8-11). For these and several other reasons, Jochelson eveninsisted that the Siberian team work under some sortof Joint sponsorship by the American Museum, theRussian Imperial Geographic Society, and the RussianAcademy of Sciences."^ Whereas Russian Governmentsupport of the JNPE proved to be dubious at best (seeFreed et al. 1988; Vakhtin 2001:86-7), the Academy'sand Radloffs personal backing of the JNPE was abso-lutely unequivocal.

The Russians also urged that any duplicate speci-mens from the Jesup Expedition's Siberian collectionswere to be donated to the MAE in return for their co-operation (Anonymous 1907:68). When the Siberiancollections were finally sorted out in New York, MorrisJesup presented approximately 300 specimens as theAmerican Museum's gift to the Tzar's family. Theseobjects were promptly turned over to the MAE collec-tion (Anonymous 1907:68; Mikhailova and Kupina2002). Boas' interactions with Radloff and the RussianAcademy during and after the JNPE began a long tradi-tion of exchanges between the American Museum andthe MAE (Kupina n.d.).

The Jesup Expedition team's continuous use of theInternational Congresses of Americanists as a meetingand promotion venue for the 25 years following theexpedition is another illustration of the high value Boasand his Russian partners—Jochelson, Bogoras, and

20

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Shternberg—assigned to international academic con-tacts. It also showed how strongly they tried to over-come the drawbacks of artificial separation and isola-tion caused by World War I and the political storms ofthe 20th century (Kan 2000; 2001). Their professionalinteractions forged during the preparation and field-work of the Jesup Expedition eventually developed intopersonal ties, as Bogoras and Jochelson stayed for sev-eral months in New York in 1903-4 while working ontheir Siberian collections and preparing their mono-graphs for the JNPE volumes. This, in turn, contributedto more professional cooperation and to the orches-trated international promotion of the JNPE project. In1904, Boas, Bogoras, Jochelson, and Shternberg deliv-ered four Jesup-related presentations at the 14th Inter-national Congress of Americanists in Stuttgart, Germany(Krupnik 1998:205). The JNPE team members contin-ued to use the Americanist Congresses as their maininternational venue at several successive sessions,including those in Quebec in 1 906 (Boas and Jochel-son), in Vienna in 1 908 (Boas), and in London in 1912Oochelson and Shternberg; see references in Krupnik2001:300-7)

Personal contacts among the key Jesup Expeditionmembers, such as Boas, Jochelson, Bogoras, andShternberg, were rejuvenated at the 21 st InternationalCongress of Americanists in 1924 (Fig.3), after a de-cade-long gap created by World War I, two revolu-tions, and the Civil War in Russia. It blossomed again atthe 23rd Congress of 1928 in New York where Boas,Jochelson, and Bogoras met personally for the last time.Several papers in Arctic/Siberian ethnology were alsocontributed to the New York Congress of Americanists(1928) by younger Russian students of Bogoras andShternberg (Bogoras and Leonov 1930; Dyrenkova1930; Ivanov 1930; Vishnevsky 1 930—see Krupnik1998:206), and by Bruno Oetteking, a Boasian discipleat the American Museum. At this time it appeared thatthe bonds that were fostered during the JNPE yearswere about to be transmitted to a second generationof students trained by members of the original Jesup

Expedition team.^ But a new partnership never materi-alized, because Russian-American academic contactswere severed after the years 1 936-38 due to politicalpurges in Russia and Bogoras' death. Soon much ofthe Pacific Coast of Siberia became enmeshed in barbedwire around GULAG labor camps and military installa-tions, and the region became closed to internationalresearch and cooperation for almost 50 years.

However, the JNPE legacy in North Pacific culturalstudies made a surprising comeback when academiccontacts and exchange visits were gradually reestab-lished during the 1960s and the 1970s and new jointstudies were launched in prehistory, archaeology, eth-nology, and museum studies of the North Pacific indig-enous peoples (Laughlin 1975, 1985; Michael 1979;Anonymous 1981; Michael and VanStone 1983; Fitz-hugh and Crowell 1988). Since that time Russian schol-ars have often called the Jesup-era partnership "themost productive international venture in Siberian/NorthPacific ethnography" (Gurvich 1979; Kuz'mina 1981;Gurvic and Kuzmina 1985). In both the Russian andNorth American academic tradition, the JNPE has a veryspecial image as a symbol and model of opennessand international collaboration (Fitzhugh 1994, 1996,this volume; Fitzhugh and Crowell 1988; Fitzhugh andKrupnik 2001; Kuz'mina 1994; Vakhtin 1 993).

This special aura of the Jesup-era partnership inNorth Pacific cultural research was stressed repeatedlyin every new international exchange effort and researchcooperation, of which the Crossroads of Continents ex-hibit, the Mini-Crossroads exhibit tour in Alaska and Si-beria (1993-7), the Jesup 2 program, and the Jesup Ex-pedition Centenary conference in New York in 1997were the most successful examples. In fact, the Cross-roads of Continents project, both as an exhibit and apublication, was promoted in the 1 980s as a "delayedsummary volume of Franz Boas'Jesup Expedition se-ries" (Fitzhugh and Crowell 1988:15; Fitzhugh, thisvolume). But more importantly, it was seen as a begin-ning of a new era of cooperation, not a conclusion ofthe one started by Boas and his team in 1 897.

I. KRUPNIK AND N. VAKHTIN

It was surely the charisma of the Jesup Expeditionfield research and of its voluminous publications thatmotivated so many Western anthropologists to dreamof field studies in Siberia for several decades after theoriginal JNPE surveys of 1897-1902. As soon as theCold War was over and the Ice Curtain in the BeringSea disappeared in 1988-90, scores of Western an-thropology students flew to Russia to begin the firstnew series of ethnological studies in Siberia in almosta century. Several of these pioneers—students of stu-dents of students of Boas—were among the partici-pants of the Jesup Expedition centenary conference inNew York in 1 997. Their field studies were often con-ducted with Russian partners who were similarly trainedby students of students of Bogoras and Shternberg orwere influenced byJNPE publications. This latter contri-bution to the lasting JNPE legacy is certainly another ofits notable achievements.

Education and Training

Any large research project in the social sciences todayis also tested against such "outreach" criteria as dis-semination of knowledge, education, and training. TheJNPE clearly scores high along these lines. Its outstand-ing record of approximately 200 publications has beenalready cited in this regard. What is more important.Boas deliberately targeted certain periodicals, such asScience, American Anthropologist, The American MuseumJournal, the AMNH Annual Reports, Proceedings of theInternational Congresses of Americanists, and severalGerman scientific Journals, to build an extended seriesof Jesup-generated publications. Other Jesup Expedi-tion team members, particularly Laufer, Smith, Bogoras,and Jochelson followed his lead. For the first time inthe history of anthropology, the outcomes of an inter-national research project were printed, edited, trans-lated, and consistently disseminated over several yearsin three languages—English, German, and Russian—across linguistic and state boundaries. With this, a newpattern in public outreach and concerted dissemina-tion of scientific knowledge was created. Thanks to

the JNPE, this new multilingual format became solidlyestablished in Beringian/North Pacific research, and hasbeen successfully implemented in later efforts, includ-ing the most recent "Jesup 2" program (see Fitzhughand Krupnik 2001).

The success of the JNPE in what is now called edu-cation and training is all the more appealing. The origi-nal expedition's field team was extremely diverse interms of its professional and educational background.It included several young people in their early to mid-20s, such as Smith, Dixon, Axelrod, Buxton; freshly-minted Ph.D. graduates, like Laufer and Swanton; it alsofeatured far more seasoned Russians, who were formerpolitical exiles with incomplete and aborted educa-tions from decades earlier, such as Jochelson, Bogoras,and Shternberg (and their wives), as well as self-edu-cated local residents, like Hunt and Teit. The only per-son with an academic status and established publica-tion record in anthropology was Boas himself. Of course,there was also the project's nominal leader, Prof. FredericW. Putnam, but he never went to the field and there ishardly any evidence that Putnam played an active rolein the Expedition after 1898. We know almost nothingabout his interaction with the JNPE members, otherthan Boas and Smith. Hence, it was mainly up to Boasto train his team members and to promote their scien-tific careers.

With this in mind, the team's post-expedition recordin professional achievement is worth acknowledging.Bogoras, Jochelson, Laufer, Smith, Dixon, Swanton, andShternberg built recognized academic reputations andbecame world-class anthropologists of their time. Sev-eral other Jesup Expedition participants had no lessprominent life stories, such as Livingston Farrand, whowas later the President of Cornell University and of theAmerican Red Cross, and DinaJochelson-Brodsky, whobecame the first trained female North Pacific anthro-pologist, with a German Ph.D. on the physical anthro-pology of Native women in Siberia (1906). The out-standing role of local JNPE participants, such as GeorgeHunt and James Teit, was not fully recognized until

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recently (see Berman 2001; Wickwire, this volume). Whatthen had been started as merely an array of enthusias-tic students and self-made local experts is now unani-mously viewed as a team of professional "super-stars."

Over the years following the expedition, the JNPEmembers also trained students of their own, and someof these students built successful careers in expandingand developing thejesup Expedition's legacy. The post-Jesup students of Boas—from Kroeber to Coldenweiserto Sapir to de Laguna—eventually became the singlemost powerful intellectual cohort in the history of NorthAmerican anthropology (Darnell 2001). Their exposureto, and enrichment by, the Jesup-era experience of theirmentor, as well as his influence on the selection oftheir Ph.D. research, has hardly been explored and re-mains to be documented.

The educational impact of the Jesup Expeditionexperience upon the later anthropological research inSiberia was even more striking. Here, the scientific "ge-nealogies" leading from Boas and his JNPE Russian part-ners have been quite visible (Krupnik 1998:205-6).During the 1920s, the two Russian members of theJNPE project, Waldemar Bogoras and Leo Shternberg,trained dozens of younger Russian anthropology stu-dents, who followed the Boasian/Jesup Expedition in-tellectual paradigm that combined ethnology, linguis-tics, folklore and museum collecting within small andwell-defined research areas. These "post-Jesup" disciplesshaped the new face of Siberian ethnography. Manywere sent to the field to survey the areas and Nativegroups once charted by their teachers from the first Je-sup generation. Erukhim Kreinovich (1904-84) took upShternberg's work among the Nivkh on Sakhalin Is-land; Alexander Forshtein (1904-68) was sent by Bogor-as to study the Siberian Yupik in Chukotka; Sergei Steb-nitskii (1906-42) worked among the Reindeer Koryakonce surveyed byJochelson; and Nikolai Shnakenburg(1907-41) studied the Chukchi of the northern ChukchiPeninsula, who had not been reached in 1900-1 byBogoras on his JNPE tour (Krupnik 1998: 207). Otherssurveyed the arctic and inland portions of Siberia.

Altogether, approximately 70-80 Russian schol-ars were active in studies of the cultures, languages,and prehistory of Siberian Native populations duringthe 1 930s (Krupnik 1 998:207). Almost all of them wereborn between the years 1895 and 1910; the patternof anthropological fieldwork and research they fol-lowed was inspired, at least in some way, by theBogoras-Shternberg brand of field and theoretical an-thropology (also known as the "Leningrad School" ofSiberian ethnography). Though never acknowledgedin Russia as a Boasian or a Jesup Expedition legacy, itstrongly influenced the field of Russian and Soviet Si-berian studies for almost 40 years. Unfortunately,most of these post-Jesup students of Bogoras andShternberg became World War II military and civiliancasualties, as well as victims of the earlier politicalpurges of the 1930s (Krupnik 1998; Reshetov 1994,1995a, 1995b, 2002).

JNPE as an Archive of Native Cultural Re-sources

The need to document Native cultures and to collectpieces of this legacy before an anticipated demise underthe expanding industrial civilization (later called "sal-vage anthropology") was clearly on the Jesup Expedi-tion agenda. It was also one of the primary personalconcerns of its many individual participants. As Bogorasbluntly put it, even the Chukchi, then the most vibrantSiberian Native nation, could endure "[ojniy if left aloneby civilization. As soon as the latter comes too near,the Chukchee must follow in the way of so many otherprimitive tribes, and die" (Bogoras 1909:733).

The destructive impact of acculturation was report-edly quite obvious to the JNPE researchers on the NorthAmerican Northwest Coast and in several places inSiberia. By vigorously collecting Native specimens, ex-cavating sites, casting and measuring human faces andbodies, making photographs, and documenting folk-lore and languages. Boas and other JNPE members es-poused the pattern of "salvage anthropology" (seeCole and Long 1999:236-7), which was framed

I. KRUPNIK AND N. VAKHTIN

according to the professional standards and positivis-tic values of the time. Hence, the various artifacts ofNative legacies were to be collected, displayed, andpreserved first and foremost for the sake of expandingacademic knowledge. During the Jesup Expedition era,which was so "obsessed with objects" (cf. Jacknis1996:194), great museums like the AMNH and theSmithsonian were seen as the main venues for the con-struction of anthropological knowledge and for its dis-semination to the public at large. The latter then re-ferred to the urban educated American and Europeanpopulace. Native people were not considered as po-tential users of the expedition's voluminous collectionsand publications; at least we do not see any indica-tions in this regard.

It took almost 100 years for the JNPE collections toundergo a miraculous transition. Before our own eyes,the expedition's various contributions are being trans-formed from a "corpus of scientific data" into "objectsof bright pride" (Wardwell 1978) and finally into a new"cultural resource" for the Native nations of the Jesuparea. This transformation has been amply documentedby the Chiefly Feasts exhibit produced from the JesupExpedition Northwest Coast collections at the Ameri-can Museum of Natural History Oonaitis 1 991). It is simi-larly manifested in two recent catalogs of the travel-ing Crossroads Alaska-Siberia exhibit (Chaussonnet1995:7) and the AMNH centennial presentation ofthe Jesup Expedition photography of 1897-1902(Kendall etal. 1997).

This transformation, in fact, has resulted in an un-precedented (and quite unexpected) increase in thevalue of the expedition's data, publications, and mu-seum collections. It was as if old papers and photo-graphs, linguistic and folklore texts, archival manuscriptsand hundreds of anthropological data sheets acquiredadditional meaning and found a new constituency. Asthe JNPE materials become "new resources" inspiringcultural revitalization of the area's Native nations, theydo not cease to be objects of anthropological andmuseum science. Several papers in this volume explore

2 4

these new dimensions in the modern use of Jesup-eraethnographic collections (see chapters by Fitzhugh;Ivanov-Unarovand Ivanova-Unarova; Loring and Vettre;and Webster, this volume). They offer an inspiring per-spective on how present-day people read early de-scriptions of their culture; how they enjoy century-oldphotographs; and how the old folklore records andmuseum artifacts are used to develop modern art,school curricula, and educate children. This was some-thing the JNPE team members then hardly had in mind,but nevertheless, due to their dedicated work, it be-came possible now, 100 years after their enterprise.

Conclusion

As these and other post-JNPE achievements are broughttogether as parts of a single record, we believe wehave solid ground for a centenary celebration. But be-yond the list of the Expedition's accomplishments andshortcomings there is a certain lasting charisma to theoriginal JNPE project. It continues to inspire anthropol-ogy professionals and local cultural enthusiasts muchin the same way it fascinated its prospective mem-bers, sponsors. Boas' colleagues, and the public at large,when the expedition blueprint was first unveiled morethan 100 years ago (Cole 2001; Vakhtin 2001).

From a modern perspective, one could see the JNPEas a fascinating experiment in scholarly planning and ascientist's once-in-a-lifetime dream. For the first (andin fact, the only) time during his long career, FranzBoas secured ample resources, an excellent team,and the institutional support he needed to carryout a research plan he could design, supervise, anddeliver almost exclusively at his discretion.' It also of-fered him a unique opportunity to project his personalvision of anthropology, the "Americanist" tradition, inRegna Darnell's term (Darnell 2001:10-20) on a multi-year research enterprise, and to advertise that vision inthe international scientific arena. That was an appealof tremendous power. Today one can still feel theproject's magnetism as palpably as many people did100 years ago.

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However, even the best-designed dreams rarelycome true. The JNPE project eventually fell victim tothe intellectual battle Boas fought throughout his en-tire academic career. Since his early professional years,he argued fervently in favor of a clear-cut distinctionbetween two major approaches (or methods) in scien-tific research—one advocating the search for generallaws and the other aimed at scrupulous adherence tofacts. In several of his papers Boas repeatedly calledthis distinction an opposition between the "compara-tive" and the "historical" method of inquiry (Boas 1896,1940:271 -7), or the one between the "physicists" andthe "cosmographers" (Boas 1887,1940:642-^3; Jacknis1996:186-88; Stocking 1996:5). And he made it clearthat he sought his own place firmly in the cosmogra-phers' camp.

This vigorous academic partisanship was quicklychallenged by and tested against the very format ofthe JNPE project. Boas was charged to design whatwe would call today the "JNPE overall program," in-cluding a project justification and fieldwork outline.Toward this end. Boas the physicist offered promisesthat were tempting to prospective sponsors and pub-lic audience, because of the unprecedented generalimplications of research he suggested (such as to "dis-cover the origin and early history of the native Ameri-can race"). Ironically, under the same scenario, Boas thecosmographer was assigned to develop a field pro-gram and to supervise the process of research, datacollecting, and publication down to the minute detail.This worked well for the five years of field surveys andfor publication of the expedition's reports and its vari-ous collected materials—until the cosmographer waspushed towards his last challenge: project synthesisand historical generalization.

For Boas this must have been a tormenting experi-ence, since he was destined to overstep the very prin-ciples he zealously advocated for almost two decades.As he himself urged just one year before the JesupExpedition began and in citing the very Native culturesof Alaska and Siberia it was supposed to survey, "[o]nly

when definite results have been obtained in regard tothis area [i.e., small and well-defined individual territo-ries that form the basis of study—I.K., N.V.] is it permis-sible to extend the horizon beyond its limits; but thegreatest care must be taken not to proceed too hast-ily in this" (Boas 1896, 1940:277). With hindsight, wemust conclude that nothing in the expedition's volu-minous data rendered any assurance that the resultsobtained were "definite," that "extensions beyond thehorizon" were now permissible, and that any movetoward generalization would not be "too hasty."

On the contrary, each Native culture studied andeach area covered by the JNPE revealed its never-end-ing story of cultural complexity and historical depth. Itis not surprising that Boas became increasingly reluc-tant to jump into extensive comparative speculationacross the North Pacific area.* He did produce severalshort summaries of the expedition's results and/or somebroad overviews of the North Pacific cultural prehis-tory (Boas 1903, 1905, 1910, 1925, 1928, 1933). Buthe continuously procrastinated and, as we believe,finally abandoned the idea of a concluding generalvolume for the Jesup Expedition series, which he hadpromised to Morris Jesup as a key component of theproject (Cole 2001:42-3,48).'' To Boas this was by nomeans an intellectual failure but rather a deliberateevasion, for he had once again realized that "[t]he solidwork is still all before us" (Boas 1896, 1940:280). Hesimply left the task to those who might possess bet-ter data and more extensive knowledge in the future—that is, to us.

Thus, the Jesup Centenary Conference of 1997 andthis volume of proceedings marks just one more stepin the ongoing re-evaluation of the unique Boasiandesign of the JNPE project. The very list of the confer-ence participants, which included ethnologists, linguists,physical anthropologists, archaeologists, folklorists,natural scientists, and museum curators; Americans,Canadians, Russians,Japanese, and Europeans; profes-sional academics. Native researchers, cultural workers,and community leaders, was a roster with a distinctly

I. KRUPNIK AND N. VAKHTIN

Boasian outlook. As their papers presented here re-veal, there is hardly any present-day inquiry concern-ing the peoples and cultures of the North Pacific areathat does not bear, in one way or another, an imprintof the Jesup Expedition—whether it deals with Nativeethnic traditions, physical anthropology, myths, cul-ture transformation, prehistoric relationships, culturalobjects, historical photography or museum collections.Indeed, we have good cause to celebrate the cente-nary of the Boas'Jesup North Pacific Expedition and amemory of the person who introduced such a power-ful model to anthropological science.

Acknowledgements

A shorter version of this paper was delivered as theopening address to the Jesup Expedition Centenaryconference in 1997. We are grateful to William Fitzhugh,IraJacknis, Sergei Kan, Laurel Kendall, Julia Kupina, andWilliam Sturtevant for their critical comments and helpfulsuggestions. This paper as well as earlier historiographicstudies of the Jesup Expedition's legacy is an outgrowthof the Jesup 2 program initiated in 1992.

Notes

1. The list of contracted (enlisted) partici-pants on thejesup Expedition includes: Franz Boas(1858-1942), Alexandr Axelrod (1879-1945),Waldemar Bogoras (1865-1936), Norman C.Buxton (1872-?), Roland Dixon (1875-1934),Livingston Farrand (1867-1939), Gerard Fowke(1855-1933), George Hunt (1854-1933), FilippJacobsen, Waldemar Jochelson (1855-1937),Berthold Laufer (1 873-1 934), John Swanton (1 873-1 958), James Teit (1 864-1 922). Mrs. Sofia Bogorasand Dina Jochelson-Brodsky (1 864-1 941) accom-panied their husbands in the field and participatedin collecting and research activities; DinaJochelson's contribution was critical for theexpedition's success in physical anthropology andphotography in Siberia. Oregon C. Hastings, a pro-fessional photographer from Victoria, made doz-ens of photographs for the expedition in 1897;Charles F. Newcombe, another Victoria resident,participated in collecting and coastal surveys in

1 897 and 1 900. Frederic W. Putnam (1 839-1 91 5)officially supervised the project at the AMNH dur-ing the years 1897-98. Leo Shternberg (1861-1927) and Bruno Oetteking (1 871-1 960) joinedthe JNPE publication program after the comple-tion of fieldwork. Several people—local guides,interpreters. Native informants, recruited dog-teamdrivers, and local officers—accompanied JNPE teammembers on their surveys across Siberia and NorthAmerica, though few are specially acknowledged(see also Kan, this volume).

2. Haida, Tsimshian, KwakiutI (Kwak-waka'wakw), Heiltsuk, Bella Coola (Nuxalk),Chilkotin, Nootka (Nuu-chah-nulth), Lilooet(Sta'atl'imx), Thompson (NIaka'pamux), Quileute,Chinook, Chemakum, and Quinault, with thelater addition of the Aleut, Tlingit, Shasta, andMaidu.

3. Chukchi, Yupik/Asiatic Eskimo, Koryak,Even (Tungus), Itelmen (Kamchadal), Yukagir, Rus-sian Creole, Nivkh (Gilyak), Nanay (Gold), and Sakha(Yakut), with three more nations, Ainu, Orok (Uilta),and Negidal visited on shorter trips.

4. Co-authored papers and volumes were theonly component of modern team work that wasmissing in the JNPE publications, with the excep-tion of two volumes of KwakiutI texts that hadboth Boas' and Hunt's names on the cover, and afew minor pieces by Boas incorporated into con-tributions by Smith, Teit, and Jochelson. Even thehusband-wife field team of Waldemar and DinaJochelson did not publish anything under their twonames.

5. This can be seen from a letterhead printedon several of Jochelson's letters and field reportsfrom Siberia (now at the AMNH): Siberian Depart-ment of thejesup North Pacific Expedition fittedout by the American Museum of Natural Historywith the assistance of the Russian Imperial Acad-emy of Sciences and the Russian Imperial Geo-graphic Society.

6. The best known example was JuliaAverkieva's fieldwork with Boas among theKwakiutI in 1930-31 (Averkieva and Sherman1 992). Averkieva (1 946:1 02) mentioned five Rus-sian anthropology students who went on ex-change fellowships to the U.S. in 1929. At leastthree American anthropologists and anthropologystudents—Roy Barton, Emanuel Gonick, a former

]00 YEARS/ EVALUATING ACCOMPLISHMENTS

student of Kroeber, and Archie Phinney, a NativeAmerican student of Boas—were studying or worl<-ing in Leningrad during the 1 930s on internationalresearch fellowships arranged by Boas andBogoras (Krupnik 1 998; Willard 2000).

7. Thus, the Jesup Expedition has been rightlycredited as one of the stepping stones in whatwas called "The Boasian Anthropological SurveyTradition" (Cole and Long 1999:234). All postu-lated tenets of this approach—anti-evolutionism;the tilt toward diffusionist interpretations; the eth-ics of salvage ethnology; the collection of folk-lore and linguistic texts; the famous "four-field"focus of fieldwork; and the primary role of trainedprofessionals (ibid:234-6)—were amply displayedin the JNPE organization, fieldwork, and publica-tions.

8. Regna Darnell (2001:43) made a similarpoint in her evaluation of the general shift in Boas'vision of anthropology that took place around1905, obviously, or at least partly, as a result ofthe JNPE experience. "Early in his career, perhapsas a carry-over from his scientific training in phys-ics and geography. Boas emphasized the possi-bility, albeit at some unspecified future time, ofarriving at "laws governing the growth of culture"(Boas 1 898b:2). [...]When laws analogous to thoseof the natural sciences failed to emerge. Boas re-treated to a deconstructionist rhetoric of whathe considered premature generalizations distort-ing the increasing body of ethnographic dataagainst which potential "laws" could be tested(see Boas 1906:642).

9. The plan to provide a summary report ofthe JNPE surveys was first announced by Boas inhis paper delivered at the Thirteenth InternationalCongress of Americanists (1 902). According to hisplan, this would be accomplished as the final vol-ume of the Jesup Expedition series. It was featuredseveral times as "Volume 12. Summary and FinalResults" on the cover pages of the subsequentvolumes under the Jesup Expedition series pub-lished during the 1 900s and 1 91 Os. The last timeit was mentioned in 1930 as the "forthcomingPt.3 of Vol. 1 1" ("Summary and Final Results") onthe cover page of Volume 1 1, Pt. 1 (Oetteking1 930). This summary volume was obviously neverproduced and probably never even started.

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2001 A Jesup Bibliography: Tracking the Publishedand Archival Legacy of the Jesup Expedition. In: Gate-ways. Exploring the Legacy of the Jesup North PacificExpedition, 1897-1902. Igor Krupnik and William W.Fitzhugh, eds. Pp. 297-316.Contributions to Circum-polar Anthropology, 1. Washington, DC: Arctic Stud-ies Center.

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2000 Boas, Brinton, and the Jesup North Pacific Ex-pedition: The Return ofthe Americanoids. EuropeanReview of Native American Studies 14(2): 11 -7.

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I. KRUPNIK AND N. VAKHTIN

Ti^e 5o-Ca!!ec] "Hski'mo Wedge":

/\ (^enturtj after Jesup

DON E. DUMOND

A central accomplishment of the Jesup North PacificExpedition was the demonstration of systematic cul-tural similarities among Asian and American peoplesaround the northern coastline of the Pacific Ocean.Folklore, in particular, suggested a continuity fromNorthwest Coast Indian groups on the east to Paleo-Asiatic Siberian people such as Chukchi, Itelmen, andKoryak on the west—but a continuity seemingly inter-rupted by Eskimo in Alaska and around Bering Strait.Bogoras (1902:670) and then Jochelson (1908:359-60) were evidently the first to use the term "wedge" ininferring a late intrusion of these Eskimo people to splitapart a formerly unbroken chain of the North Pacificpeoples, and both continued in this conception (e.g.,Bogoras 1 925:225-26; Jochelson 1928:53-4).

Whoever actually originated this vision. Boas (e.g.,1905:98-9) found it to harmonize with his own previ-ously expressed conviction that the Eskimo peoplehad moved to the Bering and Chukchi seas from aplace of origin farther east in North America (Boas1888:39). Thus, he remarked that:

So far as the available material allows us tojudge, it would seem that the similaritiesbetween the Eskimo and the North PacificCoast Indians are unimportant as comparedto the similarities between the Koryak andChukchee and these Indians. We must inferfrom these facts that the Eskimo are newarrivals on the Pacific side of America, andthat they interrupted, at an early period, thecommunication between the Siberian andIndian tribes (Boas 1905:98-9).

And the theme was set.

Bogoras (1 925:224-34) and Jochelson (1 908:358-9) were more noncommittal with regard to a point oforigin for this "Eskimo wedge." Nevertheless, the cus-tom of arguing over American versus Asian origins ofthe Eskimo and related Aleut peoples is an old one(see, for example, summaries in Collins 1937:1-13,1951:423-25) that has continued into recent decades.At the same time, there is a shared opinion that thehistoric Eskimo possessed the most successful of allaboriginal adaptations to the winter-frozen seas lyingbetween northeast Asia and northwestern NorthAmerica. Bogoras, the ethnographer, for instance, be-littled both Itelmen (Kamchadal) and coastal Koryakwhen contrasted with Asiatic Eskimo in that regard(Bogoras 1925:217, 226).

The notion of a wedge-like movement of Eskimoto Bering Strait, however, was arrived at by Jesup re-searchers not only without direct field study of Alas-kan Eskimo people, but also in the complete absenceof any archaeological information pertaining to the Es-kimo region of Siberia and America. To cast light onthe development of Eskimo culture and of this postu-lated "wedge," I examine presently available archaeo-logical evidence both of ancient linkages across thenorthernmost extension of the Pacific and of the de-velopment of that northern maritime adaptation whichthe Eskimo people so well exemplified.

The Terminal Pleistocene

As is well known, there is no consensus regarding thetime and circumstance of the initial peopling of the

3 3

New World—generally presumed to have been by wayof the Pleistocene-age Beringian land platform thatunited Asia and America when seas were lower. Thereis more agreement that by sometime before 10,000radiocarbon years ago,' when the Beringian platformbegan to flood by rising waters that would form theBering and Chukchi seas (Elias et al. 1992; Fairbanks1989), terrestrial hunters of pronouncedly Asian castwere present in what is now Alaska. These chippers ofblades, of bladelets ("microblades") pushed from smallwedge-shaped cores, and of a few bifaces or spear-point-like implements, have been referred to as theAmerican Paleo-Arctic cultural tradition (Anderson 1968,1970), and in central Alaska to the Denali complex(e.g., West 1 967, 1 996:546-7). In Northeast Asia (Fig.5), the technological analog has been most commonlytermed the Diuktai culture, which was well representedin the Lena River drainage a number of millennia before10,000 years ago (Mochanov 1977; Mochanov andFedose'eva 1984,1996), and at partly concurrent timesas far east as the territory of Russian coastal Primorye[Far Eastern Maritime Region - ed.] (Larichev et al. 1992),as well as Hokkaido (Aikens and Higuchi 1982),Sakhalin Island (Larichev et al. 1992; Vasil'evskii 1996),Kamchatka Peninsula (Dikov 1977, 1996) and theChukotka (Chukchi) Peninsula (Dikov 1993).^

In both Northeast Asia and Alaska this stage wasfollowed by, or developed into, another stage in whichsomewhat broader blades were derived from less for-mally restricted cores, and bifaces were normally lack-ing (Ackerman 1992; Mochanov 1977; Mochanov andFedose'eva 1984). In Siberia this Sumnagin culture isdated as early as 10,000 years ago (Mochanov andFedose'eva 1984). In America the comparable mani-festation is present by 8000 years ago, and perhapssome centuries earlier, at which time it would appearthat communication with Asia was continuing. Peopleof this stamp and perhaps their microblade-makingpredecessors were present along the shores of theNorth Pacific in what is now southeastern Alaska(Ackerman 1992, with many references). Although fau-

nal remains are scarce, one of the sites there has yieldedremains of mollusks and of both ocean and freshwaterfishes, in levels dated about 8200 years ago (Ackermanet al. 1985).

By this time, also, there were people occupyingthe Anangula Blade site, located on what is now anislet near the coast of present Umnak Island, one ofthe two largest of the Fox group of the eastern Aleu-tians (Aigner 1978; Laughlin 1 975). It has been arguedthat this location was already insular at the time ofoccupation (Black 1974). Although that view has beenchallenged (Thorson and Hamilton 1986), the site wasclearly positioned at the ocean edge on either an is-land or a salient peninsula. Again, significant faunal re-mains are lacking, but the extreme edgewater loca-tion alone is enough to suggest subsistence attentionto the seacoast.^

In Asia, however, sites of the same period appearto have been oriented consistently toward terrestrialresources. Although trade in obsidian from Hokkaidothrough Sakhalin Island developed to its highestpoint after the two land masses were separated bythe flooding of the strait between them (Vasil'evskii1996), suggesting an ability to make serious use ofwatercraft well before 7000 years ago, there is nolocational or faunal evidence of any serious focus onmarine resources (Yaroslav V. Kuz'min, personal com-munication, 1 997).

Whatever the case for communication betweenAsia and America in the two or three millennia follow-ing the end of the Pleistocene, by about 6000 yearsago paths between Alaska and Chukotka (Chukchi Pen-insula) were closed by rising seas that establishedocean currents in substantially their present patternthrough Bering Strait. At this date the earliest Neo-lithic cultures of Siberia (Mochanov and Fedos-e'eva1984) show no resemblance to what, in the thendeglaciated northwestern America, is called theNorthern Archaic tradition (Anderson 1968), or tothe Ocean Bay tradition of the north Pacific shorearound Kodiak Island (D. Clark 1979).

100 YEARS/ THE "ESKIMO WEDGE"

Nevertheless, at this same time there are clear indi-cations of an improved adaptation to the coast of theNorth Pacific in Asia as well as in North America. Sig-nificantly, in both cases such advances occur south ofthe region in which sea ice forms in winter. In North-east Asia, the best information proceeds from the north-ernmost Japanese island of Hokkaido, where shell-mounds that may date as early as 7000 years ago

6000 years ago (David Yesner, personal communica-tion, 1 997), although comparable sites are not knownto be numerous in the region for another two millennia(Yaroslav V. Kuz'min, personal communication, 1997;see articles in Vostretsov 1998). All of these Asian sites,however, are south of 45° north latitude and more than3000 km from the nearest point in Asia that was oc-cupied by historically known Eskimo.

yield vertebrate fauna including sea lion, fur seal, dol-phin, and whale (Nishimoto 1988; Okada 1998). By6000 years before present some Hokkaido peoplewere deriving as much as 50 percent of their dietaryprotein from marine sources (Minagawa and Akazawa1992). The great majority of relevant Hokkaido sitesare on coasts open all year, although one or two lie onthe northern shore, which is icebound in winter. Onthe perennially open coast of Primorye [Russian FarEastern 'Maritime Region' - ed.] near Vladivostok, thesite of Boisman 2 (Popov et al. 1 995) has yielded asubstantial marine fauna possibly dated as much as

In America, the southern limit of icebound coastslies much farther north. Near Kodiak Island, at latitude57", seas are open all winter, and sites dating shortlyafter 6000 years ago have yielded not only plentifulbarbed harpoon heads, but faunal remains of harborseal, porpoise, sea otter, and Steller sea lion, as well asshorebirds, waterfowl, and albatross, and fishes suchas cod, salmon, and halibut (C.H. Clark 1 977; Dumond1998a). By 5500 years ago or shortly thereafter, ananalogous complex was present along the open-wa-ter seas of the eastern Aleutians, at both Umnak andUnalaska Islands of the Fox Island group, with remains

D. E. DUMOND

of seal, cod, and halibut at the latter (Davis 2001;Knecht and Davis 2001; Knecht et al. 200); Yesnerand Mack 1998). In contrast to contemporary mari-time-related sites in Asia, these are some ten degreesand a thousand kilometers farther north, and both arewithin the region occupied by Eskimo-Aleut people atthe time of first contact with Europeans in the 18thcentury.

Further, according to evidence now available, theperiod following those first unmistakable indicationsof maritime proficiency saw the peopling of the Aleu-tian Islands west of the Fox Islands group. This is indi-cated by a substantial body of radiometric dates, in-cluding many obtained by the U.S. Bureau of IndianAffairs in the course of investigations pursuant to theAlaska Native Claims Settlement Act. The pattern de-veloped is one of human passage into the island chainfrom east to west. After dates from the Fox Islands of5500 years ago and earlier, multiple dates fromAmchitka in the Rat group of islands indicate occupa-tion probably well before 4000 radiocarbon years ago,on Agattu and Shemya in the Near Islands by about2600 years ago (Dumond 2001:301-2).^ The materialculture of all islands sampled is characterized by a va-riety of sea-hunting artifacts of organic materials in-cluding both barbed and toggling harpoons, manywith chipped stone insets; it also includes lip orna-ments or labrets, oil-burning lamps, and many otherimplements chipped from stone (e.g., McCartney 1 984).In short, this was a culture with unmistakable affinitiesto that of the ethnographically known Aleut people,as well as with many parallels with the lifeway of Es-kimo people farther north. Whatever the case with theearliest inhabitants of the Umnak region 8000 yearsago, for at least the past 4500 years the record ofcontinuity in the Aleutian Islands is unmistakable.

In summary, it seems evident that even the NearIslands were reached no less than 2600 radiocarbonyears ago, and perhaps considerably earlier. Despitethe lack of extensive faunal remains in small collec-tions derived from a number of these tests, such re-

3 6

mains from the more extensive investigations, togetherwith the isolated insular character of the western Aleu-tians, confirm a mature maritime subsistence.

Behind the Ice-Fast Shores of Asia

North of the southern limit of sea ice, however, progresstoward full utilization of the seacoast was slower. InAsia, between 5000 and 3000 radiocarbon years agovarious Neolithic peoples had begun to move closerto the coasts on Sakhalin Island and around the Sea ofOkhotsk, including the lower reaches of the Amur River,and they spread into the interior hinterland of the north-western coast of the Bering Sea south of the ChukchiPeninsula. These various "Neolithic" peoples, some ofwhom now used ceramics while others did not, werecharacterized by subsistence pursuits that emphasizedriver fishing or the hunting of terrestrial animals. Whereassome of these folk did visit the seacoast, their use ofmarine resources was evidently seasonal and sporadic,forming no major focus of subsistence effort (Dumondand Bland 1995, with references).

It was several centuries after 3000 years ago thatthese seasonally ice-bound Asian regions first sawpeoples who made more serious use of the oceanshore, establishing permanent settlements by the sea,using implements such as toggling harpoons, and de-pending significantly on sea mammals and ocean fishes,although in many cases being still seasonally interestedin the interior. The newer coastal peoples includedthose of the Susuia culture of southern Sakhalin Island(Shubin and Shubina 1 984; Vasil'evskii 1996), which isseen by some researchers as an initial stage of themaritime Okhotsk culture, by others as a local prede-cessor; and they included those of the Tokarev cultureof the northern Okhotsk Sea (Lebedintsev 1990), andof the Early Lakhtin culture of the Bering Sea coast(Orekhov 1987). The appearance of these cultures wasfairly closely contemporary, between about 2700 and2500 years ago. By 2000 years ago or not long after,they were followed, respectively, by the Ozersk stageof the Okhotsk culture, by the Old Koryak culture, and

100 YEARS/ THE "ESKIMO WEDGE"

by the "Paleometal" stage of the Lakhtin culture, all ofwhich involved still more developed adaptations tothe coasts that freeze in winter (for tabulations of rel-evant dates, see Dumond and Bland 1995).

Nevertheless, as with the ethnographic Itelmen andKoryak referred to by Bogoras, even those further de-velopments fell short of the Eskimo adaptation to theicy coasts. For instance, of even the closest Lakhtin-culture neighbors of the Eskimo, Dikov (1979:256) re-marked that the bone and ivory technology was notas a rule comparable to that found in early Eskimosites of the Bering Strait region. And on the coasts ofthe Chukchi Peninsula later occupied by identifiableEskimo people, he found no indications of any pre-Eskimo occupations exhibiting a maritime adaptationcomparable to those farther south just mentioned (Dikov1993; see also Dumond and Bland 1995:430-4, withreferences).'^

And the Frozen Coasts of America

In America, an analog of the a-ceramic Neolithic cul-tures of the east Russian interior appeared as the Arc-tic Small Tool tradition, which by 4000 years ago hadspread across northernmost Canada to Greenland.These first people to inhabit the immediate hinterlandof the northernmost American coastline made use ofriver and lake fish and terrestrial animals—especiallythe caribou—and made seasonal visits to the coast,for example for spring sealing (Maxwell 1 985:84-90).Long known by researchers in Alaska as the DenbighFlint complex dating from times no earlier than 4200years ago, recent work on the Seward Peninsula hasproduced apparent Arctic Small Tool occupationsdated about 4700 years ago (Harritt 1 994:21 2, 217).The specific place of origin of these newly appearingpeople is not yet known, but the evidence presentlyavailable strongly favors immigration from Asia. Al-though without ceramics, the stone assemblage ofthe Denbigh Flint complex includes nothing that isunknown in various northeast Asian Neolithic cultures(see, for instance, Irving 1970), and it has been com-

pared especially to elements of the Bel'kachi Neolithicof the Lena River basin in northeastern Siberia (e.g..Powers and Jordan 1990). At the very least, then, theArctic Small Tool tradition appears to represent thebeginning of a second period in which contact be-tween Asia and America is attested. And this time,with the rise in seas that had covered the formerBeringian land bridge, where currents move steadilyfrom south to north at a speed sufficient to disruptwinter ice and render travel across it hazardous, thecontact must have been largely through open water.

In regions near the coast, this American culture van-ished or was superseded by 3600 years ago in thenorthwest, 500 years later in the southwest (Anderson1984; Dumond 1984), although vestiges appear tohave persisted for several centuries in some inland Alas-kan locations (e.g., Irving 1964; Kunz 1 977). It was notlong after this disappearance in the north that the firstevidence of a people with an unmistakable marine sub-sistence focus is found in the Kotzebue Sound region.On the beach numbered 53 at Cape Krusenstern onthe northern shore of the sound, a single settlementyielding remains of a culture termed "Old Whaling" isdated at about 3200 years ago. Five semi-subterra-nean houses and five more superficial camp or housetraces are interpreted as winter and summer dwellingsoccupied for a short period, perhaps no more than asingle year. Chipped stone implements, stone lamps,two pieces of polished slate, and a single togglingharpoon head occur with seal bones, walrus ivory, anda few bones of caribou. Whale debris is plentiful in thevicinity (Ciddings and Anderson 1986, chapter 12);whether the people of the little settlement were them-selves whalers or whether the whalebone in and aroundthe houses represents scavenged animals is not cer-tain, but clearly they were deriving the bulk of theirsubsistence from the sea (see Mason and Cerlach 1995).

The origin of the people represented in this short-term settlement is undetermined. Although their arti-facts have been compared by some researchers tothe much smaller collection from the site known as

D. E. DUMOND

Chertov Ovrag or Devil's Gorge, on Wrangel Island inthe Siberian sector of the Chukchi Sea (e.g., Ackerman1984), which also yielded a single toggling harpoonhead and is dated at almost exactly the same time(Dikov 1 988; Shilo et al. 1 979), no other Asian analogis known. Rather, the only area anywhere in the vicin-ity of the Bering and Chukchi seas that at this datewas demonstrably home to a significant populationof humans with specialized dependence on the sea-coast is the Aleutian Islands and the adjacent northernGulf of Alaska. As indicated earlier, by this date theAleutians were certainly settled as far west as the RatIslands, and ancestral Aleut people may already havereached the Near Islands. And as noted elsewhere(Dumond 2000), contemporary stone assemblages ofthe eastern Aleutian Islands and of the Old Whalingsettlement are not so dissimilar as to rule out a sourceof the latter somewhere in these same Aleutians Is-lands. Of significance here, also, is the conclusion ofthe linguist Knud Bergsland (1986) that the length ofseparation between Aleut and Eskimo languages isnot more than about 3000 years. In other words, thelinguistic separation occurred at approximately the timethe Old Whaling settlement appeared.

Three thousand to 2700 years ago also dates theappearance of the Choris culture, again known princi-pally from the region around Kotzebue Sound, but withpossible outliers as far east as the Mackenzie Riverdelta in northwest Arctic Canada (Sutherland 1997).The largest site collections include not only plenti-ful chipped stone implements, but other artifactsstrongly reminiscent of open-coastal Alaska to thesouth: stone lamps, labrets, barbed harpoons, anda modicum of ground slate. A few forms are com-parable to those of the Old Whaling predecessors atCape Krusenstern (Ciddings and Anderson 1986, chap-ters 10, 11). The south Alaskan characteristics of thesetwo earliest of the maritime-focused people of northAlaska, coupled with evidence of continuity in theAleutians and the Kodiak region and the relationshipbetween the two language families, Aleutian and

Eskimoan, seem to argue for a largely American ori-gin for the later Eskimo.

But during this Choris period the first ceramics ap-peared on the American coast. Impressed on the sur-face with a paddle wrapped with cords or scored withparallel linear grooves, these are clearly Asian in stimu-lus and reminiscent of ceramics reported from lateNeolithic sites of eastern Chukotka dating after 3000years ago (Dikov 1993:1 51-2). Thus, although a clearsuggestion of southern Alaskan derivation appears inthis successor to the Old Whaling culture, there is evi-dence at least equally clear of contact across BeringStrait. Meanwhile, as mentioned earlier, aspects of theArctic Small Tool tradition apparently continued in in-land Alaskan regions to the east.

Not long after 2500 years ago, and thus essen-tially contemporary with the earliest Okhotsk, Tokarev,and Lakhtin cultures of the Asian shore, the Alaskancoast north- and eastward from the Alaska Peninsulaat least as far as the present western border of Canada(MacNeish 1956) had become territory of people ofNorton culture, who in northwestern Alaska have alsobeen referred to as Near Ipiutak (Larsen and Rainey1948). These people used linear- or check-stampedceramics still of northeast Asian type, as well as tog-gling harpoon heads of bone or antler; stone lamps forburning sea mammal oil, lip ornaments, and polishedimplements in the plentiful inventory of stone tools areparticularly reminiscent of southern Alaska. In all, char-acteristics of their sites show their strong interest inthe seacoast both as a subsistence area and as alocation for settlements, while they nevertheless stillharvested interior resources such as caribou and fresh-water fish (Dumond 1 982, 1 984). In this, they providean obvious analog to the contemporary and semi-maritime Tokarev and Lakhtin cultures of the Beringand Okhotsk seas south of the Chukchi Peninsula, buta much less close similarity in settlement and subsis-tence to those more landlocked contemporary Chukot-kans whose sites have been reported thus far fromthat peninsula itself.

100 YEARS/ THE "ESKIMO WEDGE"

In the Alaskan northwest, not long after 2000 yearsago Norton or Near Ipiutak gave way to the Ipiutakculture, of a seasonally coastal people with utilitarianartifacts reminiscent of those of Norton culture, butwho did not use either ceramics or oil lamps, and whoare known especially for their elaborate art of appar-ent Asian affinity (Larsen and Rainey 1948). In south-western Alaska, on the other hand, later stages ofNorton culture endured until nearly 1000 years ago(Dumond 1982, 1984). In both north and south, how-ever, a significant proportion of the tool productionsof Norton people, like those of the Ipiutak site, havebeen compared to artifacts included within the ArcticSmall Tool tradition. In the north, indeed, Andersonexpands the classificatory Arctic Small Tool traditionto include not only the local Denbigh Flint complex,but succeeding Choris, Norton-Near Ipiutak, and Ipiutakas well (e.g., Ciddings and Anderson 1986:292-300).Although such expansion has seemed unnecessary inthe south, typological continuity there is evident (e.g.,Dumond 1981:183). Suffice it to say that the Norton-related cultures in their development drew evidentlyfrom the Arctic Small Tool tradition as well as fromprototypes on the Alaskan Pacific coast and in Asia.This is what one can reasonably term a continuationand development of the second period of prehistoriccontact across Bering Strait.

The Appearance of Eskimo Maritime Culture

It is in this milieu that the heavily sea-mammal-orientedEskimo culture of the Bering Strait region appeared,and this in turn had a decisive impact on the characterof all later Eskimo people. At present date, no directprogenitor is recognized to have been spread through-out the portion of the Bering Strait region that was tocome under Eskimo occupation. On the Seward Penin-sula of the American side of Bering Strait there is evi-dence of the one-time presence of bearers of Nortonculture (e.g., Ciddings and Anderson 1986; Harritt1994), although no large sites on that peninsula northof Cape Nome (Bockstoce 1979) have been seriously

excavated. Nor is there a clear indication there of anactual transition between Norton people and the latermaritime Eskimo, despite the designation of Ipiutakand related folk as "Paleo-Eskimo" (e.g., Larsen andRainey 1948:1 82-3, using the term "Palae-Eskimo"). Ty-pological continuity between Norton and later siteshas been claimed in regions bordering the southernBering Sea (Dumond 1 981:184), and overall continuityand a transition between them is indeed demonstratedwith seeming conclusiveness in the low-lying lands be-tween the Kuskokwim and Yukon River mouths (Shaw1 983); but these are well south of Seward Peninsula.

On the eastern Chukchi Peninsula, as well as on themajor islands in and near Bering Strait, no sites analo-gous to those of the semi-maritime Norton have beenreported. And yet this is where the maritime-orientedOld Bering Sea and Okvik cultures seem to have ap-peared full-blown. However, my own recent examina-tion of the material from the original Okvik site on oneof the small Punuk Islands located a short distance offthe east coast of St. Lawrence Island, showed five ofthe sixty-three potsherds recovered to be of standardNorton check-stamped type, the remainder plain orbearing the expanded linear-stamp markings charac-teristic of the Old Bering Sea culture as it is knownfrom St. Lawrence Island. These few Norton potsherdsmay suggest contact or a one-time Norton presenceon the island, although the evidence of either is mar-ginal, to say the least.

With regard to the version of Norton culture thatwas so plentiful on the Bering Sea coast of Alaska,there is reason to suggest that its early stages werenot directly ancestral to the ensuing early Eskimo cul-ture of St. Lawrence Island or, presumably, of that ofthe nearby Chukotka littoral. Significantly, the deco-rated ceramics of the early Old Bering Sea and appar-ently the Okvik cultures, confined to the Bering Straitislands and along the nearby Asian coastal fringe, arestamped with linear impressions somewhat broaderthan, but reminiscent of, Choris and Near Ipiutakpots, as well as of some early Norton linear-stamped

D. E. DUMOND

ceramics of the typesite of Norton culture located onthe shore of Norton Bay (Ciddings 1 964; Giddings andAnderson 1 986; Larsen and Rainey 1948)—that is, sitesgenerally north of the major Norton heartland of south-west Alaska. Apparently similar also are some ceram-ics of late Neolithic sites of the Chukchi Peninsula inte-rior (Dikov 1993:1 51 -52). Lip ornaments or labrets, socommon in Norton collections from the American coastof the Bering Sea but possibly somewhat less so northof Bering Strait, are lacking entirely in the early Old BeringSea-Okvik collections, notwithstanding the interpreta-tion of Dikov (1979:1 70) that some Okvik anthropo-morphic carvings illustrate the wearing of labrets inaddition to facial tattoos. These characteristics, likeevidence for some use of iron in Okvik-Old Bering Seaand Ipiutak collections (Arutiunov and Bronshtein 1993:67-8; Collins 1 937:146; Cusevand Zhilin 2002; Larsenand Rainey 1948:83; Semenov 1964), suggest an axisof connection that ran through Bering Strait betweenChukotka and northwestern Alaska, placing the earlySt. Lawrence Island and some Asian coastal peoplesomewhat closer in material culture to northern thanto southern Alaska, despite linguistic classifications thatappear to align them more closely to Eskimoan Yupikspeakers of the Alaskan south (e.g., Woodbury 1 984).

Regarding the chronology of the developed BeringStrait cultures—that is, those to which the term "wedge"has been especially applied—there has been disagree-ment concerning the temporal relationship of Okvikand early Old Bering Sea, with some researchers as-signing temporal priority to Okvik (e.g., Dikov 1979:1 75; Giddings 1960), others denying it (e.g., Alekseevet al. 1 972; Arutiunov and Sergeev 1 990; Rainey andRalph 1959; but see also Arutiunov and Bronshtein1993; and Bronshtein and Plumet 1995), in apparentopposition to claims linking Okvik to the Hillside siteon St. Lawrence Island and to what Collins (1937)termed the Old Bering Sea I decorative style. My ownstudy of the St. Lawrence Island collections at theSmithsonian National Museum of Natural History andmy examination of the sites around Gambell, at the

northwest extremity of St. Lawrence Island, indicateto me that some cultural elements excavated byCollins from two houses at the Hillside site are theoldest of the materials he assigned to Old Bering Sea.In significant part these predate the Mayughwaaq(Collins's Miyowagh) site which produced the largestcorpus of his Old Bering Sea material.

This conclusion rests especially on typology ofceramic and stone artifacts, and to some extent ongeographic position. The Hillside site near Gambel, St.Lawrence Island, while located on a geomorphicallyearlier formation than the Mayughwaaq site, is physi-cally so close to it that occupation of the latter wouldalmost surely have deposited material on the former.Understanding of the culture of the Hillside site hasbeen complicated by the course of research there. In1939, J. L.Giddings excavated a third house, whichthen became crucial to the conclusion of Rainey (1941)that Hillside was a site of the Okvik culture (then knownchiefly from a collection from one of the Punuk Islands);although this third prehistoric house was not then pub-lished in detail. In any event, the artifact assemblagefrom this Hillside House 3 of Giddings, which I ana-lyzed in 1994 and published recently (Dumond 1998b),sets it apart from the bulk of culture represented bythe Mayughwaaq site and places it firmly with theHillside Houses 1 and 2 of Collins, from which it differsonly in the uneven survival of decorations on harpoonheads—five heads having been recovered from House3, virtually none from floor associations of the CollinsHouses 1 and 2. One can further assert that the deco-rative style of House 3 is apart from, and hence possi-bly earlier than, other elements of the Old Bering Seastyle as known from St. Lawrence Island, and that ithas at least some (but not total) stylistic affinity tocertain artifacts illustrated for the Punuk Island Okvikcollection (Rainey 1941). Last of all, excavations at thesite in 1973 by Swiss archaeologists evidently clearedone house (designated House 5 in Table 1) that yieldeddefinitively Okvik-style artifacts (Blumer 2002:86-7),though results have not yet been widely disseminated.

40

100 YEARS/ THE "ESKIMO WEDGE"

The absolute dating of the Hillside site has unfortu-nately not been without problems. As is generallyknown, the first application of the radiocarbon methodto the Hillside site produced a determination of 2258± 230 years before present (C-505), but later re-datingof a sample of the same piece of wood by presum-ably improved technology in a different laboratoryplaced it at 1420 ± 230 B.P. (P-70). None of the otherHillside determinations run by that second laborator\'were in excess of 1641 ±65 years ago (Ralph andAckerman 1961). A few years later, H.-C. Bandi(1969:67) reported having tested a fourth house atthe Hillside site, from which he obtained a C-14 age of1 370 ± 60 years; again, no full description of the exca-vation has been published. His subsequent dating ofgraves in the Gambell area that he believed on stylisticgrounds to be early does not resolve the issue (Bandi1984; see Table 1). Finally, materials from House 5,which yielded certain Okvik-style harpoon heads, havebeen dated between about 1800 and 1 500 years ago.

In general, determinations from this and other sitesyielding material identified as Old Bering Sea have sel-dom exceeded 1 700 years before present. Notableexceptions are dates returned on material subject tothe carbon reservoir effect of the seas and thus datinganomalously early—sea-mammal bone or ivory, or hu-man remains that because of heavy dietary depen-dence on sea mammals are subject to the same skew-ing factor.*" And because the Bering Strait region isgenerally treeless, wood used by humans in either struc-tures or as fuel can be expected to have been ob-tained as driftwood, and hence to be older than itsactual use.

Table 1 shows all Old Bering Sea age determina-tions of which I am aware that exceed about 1 700years, together with some other newly obtained de-terminations. The human bone elements of sea-mam-mal-eating people from the Ekven site (SI-671 7, lEMAE-705, SI-6718, Table 1) must stand in need of correc-tion for the reservoir effect for at least 500 years or so.That such a move is reasonable is suggested by the

series of 27 determinations from human bone of theEkven site listed by Dinesman et. al. (1999, Appendix2), of which only three are in excess of 2000 radiocar-bon years, which when corrected suggest nothingearlier than 1800 years before 1950, and perhaps acentury or so later. The only determinations in presentTable 1 not evidently suspect because of the reservoireffect and that substantially exceed 1800 B.P. arethose shown from two sites on the north Chukchi Pen-insula: at Seshan, about 100 km northwest of CapeDezhnev, and from Cape Dzenretlen, some 200 kmnorthwest of the same point. Whether these two de-terminations from charcoal actually indicate the pres-ence of Old Bering Sea people on the north shore ofthe Chukchi Peninsula earlier than elsewhere, or whetheradditional dates would fall more in line with those fromtwo other sites on the same coast, like the Uten site(MAG-354), 50 km northwest of Cape Dezhnev, or CapeVankarem (MAG-352, which wants correction for res-ervoir effect), 350 km northwest of the cape, cannotnow be answered. At least I am not aware of anyother evidence that would support such an early de-velopment along the northern Chukchi Peninsula.

When I analyzed the material from the CiddingsHouse 3 at the Hillside site, I was able to date threeuncataloged samples of wood stored with the arti-fact collection. One problem here is that deficiencies inthe documentation prevent one from ascertainingwhether these samples came from an integral place inthe house itself, from overburden, or even from theexploratory trenching that led to discovery of the housefloor (Ciddings 1967:1 70-2). Only one of the three datedolder than, or even as old as, 1 700 years (Beta-7821 3,Table 1). At about the same time, Michael Lewis, of theUniversity of Alaska Museum, obtained determinationson two pieces of walrus ivory included in the House 3(Ciddings) collection, as well as on two ivory piecesfrom the Punuk Island Okvik collection that he identi-fied as bearing Okvik-style decorations (Table 1). Fi-nally, in work with the Collins Hillside site collection atthe Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History in

D. E. DUMOND

Table // Selected Bering Strait Radiocarbon Ages"

SiteMaterial

Age

Lab. Number

Reference

St. Lawrence I.Beach burials:

Burial 26 ('Okvik')

wood

1410

+

60

B-3205

Bandi 1984:61

wood

1310

+

60

B-3206

Bandi 1984:61

Burial 34 ('Okvik')

whale bone-

2450

±

40

B-2877

Bandi 1984:61

Hillside site:

1 930 excavations:

House 1

wood

1 640

1 06

P-95

Rainey & Ralph 1959

nouse J

wood

Libby 1951

wood

1420

230

P-70''

Ralph & Ackerman

1961

1 973 excavations:

House 5

wood

1460

+

50

B-2871

Blumer 2002

wood

1470

+

80

B-2872

Blumer 2002

wood

1 750

+

50

B-2867

Blumer 2002

wood

1810

+

50

B-2873

Blumer 2002

1994 analysis:

House 3

willow

1 1 00

+

70

Beta-782 1 4

Dumond 1998b

UIILII/cHUcI

1 ? 1 n

OV_/

Rpt;D.aS4Q 1DcLd OOH^I

Dumond 1998b

willow

1 oUU

yu

beta-1 OCX i

Dumond 1998b

1995 analyses:

House 1

grass

1 770

40

Beta-931 60

Dumond 1998b

walrus ivory*

2500

+

50

Beta-1 13814

Dumond 1998b

walrus ivory*

2480

+

50

Beta-1 13815

Dumond 1998b

House 2

grass

1680

+

40

Beta-91 359

Dumond 1998b

walrus ivory*

21 30

+

60

Beta-1 13812

Dumond 1998b

walrus ivory*

2240

50

Beta-1 13813

Dumond 1998b

House 3

walrus ivory*

2560

50

Beta-81 492

M. A. Lewis, pers.

com.

walrus ivory*

2660

+

50

Beta-81491

M. A. Lewis, pers.

com.

Mayughwaaq site:

1 930 excavations

wood

1630

230

P-71

Ralph & Ackerman 1 961

wood

1 700

+

1 50

P-93

Ralph & Ackerman 1 961

Punuk Islands

Okvik site:

1 993 analysis

walrus ivory"

o ^ ^ n

+

bU

Beta-o 1 4o9

M. A. Lewis, pers.

com.

walrus ivory

lk:> /U

—

DU

Beta-o 1 nyu

M. A. Lewis, pers.

com.

Asian Mainland

Uten

charcoal

1600

+

100

MAC-41 7

Shilo et al. 1979

Chini, burial 5

wood, fur

1605

+

40

MAG-228

Dikov 1977:161

Chini, burial unknown

baleen?*

1670

+

40

MAC-360

Shilo et al. 1977

Uten, burial 1

wood

1 750

+

100

MAC-354

Dikov 1 977:1 79

Cape Vankarem

baleen*

1840

+

100

MAC-352

Shilo et al. 1977

Dzhenretlen

charcoal

1990

+

190

MAG-233

Dikov 1977:194

Ekven, burial 143

human ribs*

1 745

+

75

SI-671 7

W. Fitzhugh, pers. com.

Seshan

charcoal

2022

+

100

MAG-104

Dikov 1977:185

Ekven, burial 121^

human bone*

2153

+

110

IEMAE-705

Bronshtein & Plumet, 1995

Ekven, burial 63

human ribs*

2220 ± 65

SI-671 8

W. Fitzhugh, pers. com.

^ Determinations suggesting a so-called conventional age of I 700 years or more for clearly identified OldBering Sea or Okvik, plus recently communicated determinations. Omitted are most previously published C-14determinations suggesting ages of less than I 700 years (6 from the Hillside site, 5 from Mayughwaaq, 4 fromthe Asian mainland).

* Materials marked with an asterisk are deemed subject to the marine reservoir effect and thus date too early.'° Two determinations from a single sample. See text.

^ Burial number reported by Dinesman (1999, Appendix 2), context by Bronshtein and Plumet (1995).

4 2

100 YEARS/ THE "ESKIMO WEDGE"

1995, I identified two samples of grass cataloged asrecovered in 1930 from between the floor stones ofhouses 1 and 2 of the site, which were then dated bythe AMS method (Beta-931 59, -93160, Table 1). And,as something of an afterthought regarding the magni-tude of the marine reservoir effect in the Bering Sea, Ilater was permitted to date bv the same method apair of samples of walrus ivory from each house floor(Beta-113812 through Beta-113815) that could becompared directly with the results of the determina-tions on grass from the same excavation units.

Table 1 illustrates the uncertainties that derive fromthe various factors just mentioned. First of all, I believethat the two determinations on grass, which must bea local product of both the vicinity and time of occu-pation, are the least ambiguous dates for the Hillsidesite. Given that House 3 on stylistic grounds standsapart not only from the Mayughwaaq site but to alesser extent from the two houses of the Hillside siteexcavated by Collins, from which it varies only slightlyin certain frequencies of the more common artifacts, Ihad come to accept that House 3 and, by extension,at least portions of the collection from the Okvik siteof the Punuk Islands, were slightly older than houses 1and 2. This supposed sequential relationship is sup-ported by the radiocarbon determinations on walrusivory from houses 1,2, and 3 of the Hillside site, andby one of the dates from the Okvik site (Table 1). Onthe other hand, given the magnitude of the reservoireffect suggested by the mixed suites of dates fromthe floors of houses 1 and 2 (500 to 700 years; seeDumond and Griffin 2002), there seems no reason tosuppose that any of the units of these sites exceeds2000 years in uncorrected radiocarbon age (see alsoBlumer 2002). This conclusion, of course, provides arelatively young age for the Hillside site and by impli-cation for Old Bering Sea, which has been frequentlyestimated to be at least as old as 2500 years (e.g.,Arutiunovand Bronshtein 1993; Arutiunov and Fitzhugh1988; Bronshtein and Plumet 1995; Giddings 1960). I

note, however, that this later dating accords well withthe archaeological sequence from southwestern Alaskaas I perceive it.

Concluding Discussion

What, then are the present conclusions as they relateto those of researchers of the lesuo Exoedition?

Foremost is the finding that the Eskimo populationforming the so-called "wedge"—once postulated byBogoras and Jochelson—was a fully autochthonousdevelopment of the territories adjacent to the BeringStrait region. This population developed linguisticallyfrom American progenitors but clearly sharing with Asiaimportant artifacts and cultural practices. So far as ar-chaeology can show, there was no late and intrusive"Eskimo Wedge." In fairness to Boas, however, one mustrecognize that in later writings, while not repudiatingthe idea of such a wedge, he did note linguistic evi-dence that Eskimo and Chukchi had long been neigh-bors (Boas 1933:369). And long before, even as heexpressed his enthusiasm for the notion of a late andintrusive arrival of Eskimo people at Bering Strait, hehad accepted the possibility "that a more thoroughinvestigation of the Alaskan Eskimo may correct ourpresent conclusions as to the role that this tribe playedin communicating Asiatic culture to America, andAmerican culture to Asia" (1905:99-100). This tenta-tive prediction has proven true, not only as demon-strated by archaeology but through reconsiderationof the body of myth, especially Raven myth, on whichthe ethnographers of the Jesup Expedition relied mostheavily, together with the exploration of specificallyAlaskan Eskimo conceptions (e.g., Chowning 1962;Meletinskii 1 979, 1 983). The lack of field study of Alas-kan Eskimo societies by researchers of the Jesup Expe-dition must thus be accounted a serious omission thatcontributed heavily to their erroneous postulation of arecent wedge-like movement of Eskimo people intothe Bering Strait region, a notion that persisted (andconfused) well into the mid-twentieth century.

D. E. DUMOND

Secondarily, and not in special opposition to Boas,for whom the "late" date of the Eskimo appearancearound Bering Strait was relative rather than absolute,but in opposition to later commentators who haveascribed absolute dates to the Eskimo development:the Eskimo way of life developed fully no earlier than2000 years ago, many centuries later than semi-maritime peoples had appeared on both sides ofthe Bering Sea. And among these latter, in differingways and degrees, were the various cultural, ge-netic, and linguistic ancestors of the historicallyknown Eskimo people.

Acknowledgments

I thank the University of Alaska Museum for the loanof collections from the Hillside site, and the Depart-ment of Anthropology of the National Museum of Natu-ral History, Smithsonian Institution, for facilitating studyof their collections in 1995 with support of aSmithsonian Senior Research Fellowship. I am gratefulto both for agreeing to my requests to allow dating ofitems of their collections by the radiocarbon method.

Notes

1. Herein I use only uncalibrated radiocar-bon ages.

2. I omit consideration of so-called "AlaskanPaleoindian" remains, which appear to date fromabout 10,000 years ago, appearing somewhatlater than traces of the early and apparently Asia-related peoples although in part contemporarywith them. These "Paleoindian" sites are charac-terized both by the absence of microblades andthe presence of lanceolate projectile pointsstrongly reminiscent of roughly contemporary ar-tifacts of terrestrially focused peoples of conti-nental America to the south (see pertinent articlesin Bever and Kunz 2001). Harking south and eastto the American interior, rather than west acrossBering Strait, the assemblages appear irrelevantto the present discussion.

3. Sites of similar age and affinity recordedmore recently in the Unalaska Bay area of nearbyUnalaska Island (also of the Fox group) are thus

4 4

far known only from elevations of 20 m or moreabove modern sea level, higher than ocean-edgesites of later date in the region (see Knecht andDavis 2001).

4. A single determination of about 3400 yearsago from Shemya, cited previously as a possibleindication of occupation by that time in the NearIsland (Dumond and Bland 1 995, Table 2), has beenlearned to be from material subject to a marinereservoir effect (see note 5, below) and must beconsidered younger than the measured age.

5. The coastal site of Naivan, located nearthe southern tip of the Chukchi Peninsula, has beenconcluded to represent people who devotedsome time to fishing and has been dated to 8000years or more ago (Gusev 2002)—as have someother sites reported by Dikov (1993) from east-ern Chukotka—but displays no evidence of a mark-edly maritime adaptation.

6. Over the earth as a whole, the surface wa-ters of the ocean preserve older carbon so thatorganisms inhabiting them yield "'C ages about400 years greater than terrestrial materials of thesame true calendar age, but in certain regions amuch greater excess of apparent age is impartedbecause of upwelling of still more ancient carbonfrom greater sea depths. This necessitates an ad-ditional correction; although a specific additionalfactor for the Bering Strait region has not yet beenannounced, data reported from other North Pa-cific locales entail a further correction of from 100-300 years, for a total of 500-700 years that mustbe deducted from '''C ages to bring them into linewith those from terrestrial samples. See Dumondand Griffin (2002); Stuiver and Braziunas (1 993).

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48

100 YEARS/ THE "ESKIMO WEDGE"

flailing at ^ering^trait?

~]~ine Jesup j\jorth f acific [^-Xpedition and the ^tudtj of (^.uiture (^^ontact

PETER P. SCHWEITZER

In 1908, Franz Boas—the organizer of the Jesup NorthPacific Expedition ONPE)—presented an overview of themain results of the expedition, six years after its con-clusion (Boas 1908; see Boas 2001:17-24). Despiteits unimpressive length of 16 pages, this report—deliv-ered as the Opening Address at the 16th InternationalCongress of Americanists in Vienna—was Boas' finaland most extended presentation of what he consid-ered to be the scholarly fruits of a monumental en-deavor that lasted for five years (1897-1902), costedat least $100,000, and involved almost 20 research-ers. According to Boas, the expedition's goal was toresolve the question of cultural relations between theOld and New World (Boas 1 908:4). Bering Strait, thearea where the two regions under consideration actu-ally meet and through which most of the supposedmovements of people, objects, and ideas must havepassed, should thus be considered of prime relevanceto the research questions and targets of the JNPE. How-ever, the place name "Bering Strait" was mentionedexactly three times throughout Boas' final JNPE presen-tation. One of those references was purely locational;the second one referred to Boas' conviction that Es-kimo societies were late arrivals at Bering Strait (theso-called "Eskimo Wedge theory"; see Dumond, thisvolume); and the third was in conjunction with thedistribution of reindeer herding in Northern Eurasia (andits absence in the Americas). This last reference is in-triguing, since it uses the argument of "lively interac-tion between Asia and America in the Bering Strait

area" (Boas 1908:1 7) to argue for the late transition toreindeer herding in northeastern Siberia. Alas, the ex-cited reader does not learn anything more about this"lively interaction" in Boas' final address.

During the years 1 993-96, Evgenii Colovko andmyself have conducted a multi-site oral history study,entitled "Traveling Between Continents" which wasfunded by the U.S. National Park Service, Alaska Re-gion. Our primary goal was to document the legacy ofinter-continental Native travels between Alaska andChukotka (Chukchi Peninsula) during the first half of the20th century (more specifically, until 1948, when allofficial travel across Bering Strait was halted by ColdWar politics). Since our project was situated on theAsiatic and American sides of Bering Strait, we dealtintensively with many Chukchi, Inupiaq, and NaukanYupik communities and individuals. Although we wereunable to conduct fieldwork on St. Lawrence Islandand in the southeastern section of the Chukchi Penin-sula, various references to Siberian Yupik societies fromthese areas are contained in our data. Situated at mul-tiple cultural and linguistic boundaries, "Traveling Be-tween Continents" provided us with ubiquitous in-stances of culture contact. We learned of social visits,feuds, long-distance economic endeavors, marriage ties,exchanges of personal names and songs, betweensocial units of different cultural and linguistic affiliation.Since we have provided more detailed discussions ofour results elsewhere (Schweitzer 1997; Schweitzerand Colovko 1995a, 1995b, 1997a, 2001), I will

present here the project's brief summary only, as itpertains to the character of culture contact in the BeringStrait area. This will lead us to the issue of why thosevery contacts among the North Pacific Native groupshave surprisingly eluded the interest of many of theJNPE researchers a century ago.

"Traveling Between Continents" in theBering Strait Area

Most of the culture contact processes we encoun-tered can be interpreted as exchange transactions. Inthe first place, the economic realm provides a numberof excellent examples: reindeer herders from the inte-rior Chukchi Peninsula exchanged their products for sea-mammal products with coastal communities on theAsiatic and American sides of Bering Strait, whereastransactions between maritime communities on differ-ent sides of the strait focused on goods not locallyavailable, some of which were acquired through long-distance trade. Beyond the obvious utilitarian aspectof exchanging goods, there were also instances oftransactions that defy a simple supply-and-demandmodel (for example, wolverine furs were reportedlytraded in both directions across Bering Strait). Thus, amajor element of "traveling" was the creation andmaintenance of social ties. Marriage was a logical ve-hicle to this end, but so were adoption, formalizedpartnership, informal friendship, the migration of indi-viduals, and personal naming practices. The social linksthat were established through these means were anecessary precondition for any kind of visit that wasnot based purely on negative reciprocity (such as raidsand other warfare activities). Since the equivalent ofhaving no recognized ties in a particular communitywas being considered a stranger and, thus, an enemy,kinship and other links had to be established acrosscommunity, language, and ethnic boundaries.

The structure of inter-community contacts was inno way arbitrary. Geographic and social proximity de-termined the frequency of social links between indi-vidual communities. Whereas most of these exchange

5 0

relations were balanced, there were also instancesof dominance by one side. This was most clearlyexpressed in the relations between the reindeer herd-ers and coastal communities, whereby the herdersgenerally considered themselves to be superior. Agood example of such unequal relationships wasthe spread of the Chukchi language among Yupik(and, to a much lesser degree, Ihupiaq) speakers,while there were hardly any instances of Chukchibeing able to speak Yupik or Ihupiaq.'

After 1920, nation state politics of both Russiaand the United States gradually began to exert a domi-neering influence over these links by encouraging some(those inside the country) and discouraging other ("in-ternational") connections. Euro-American group and in-dividual interests were, nothing new to the area underconsideration. Ever since the first Russian boats hadsailed through Bering Strait in the mid-1 7th century,the demand for foreign goods had contributed to thestructure of economic relations. Until the mid-19thcentury, the Asian side of Bering Strait was much closerto the supply of Russian goods, which provided itsinhabitants with more favorable exchange conditions.Subsequently these conditions were reversed, first byYankee commercial whalers after 1850 and later bytraders operating from Seattle. In the early 20th cen-tury, the Alaskan Seward Peninsula (i.e., the town ofNome) became the supply center of imported goods,while the Chukotka residents were primarily contribut-ing raw materials or goods of Native production, suchas old ivory, reindeer and fox skins, reindeer fur parkas,and skin-boots.

As we have argued elsewhere (Schweitzer andColovko2001), historic warfare in the Bering Strait areawas a syncretistic product of traditional social organi-zation (more or less autonomous social units with shift-ing alliances) and outside pressures (in a nutshell, theencroaching "World-System"). These outside pressuresled to competition over access to Euro-American goodsand indirectly contributed to the rise of Chukchi rein-deer herding, which in itself triggered tremendous

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changes within the regional network of social relations.However, warfare was as much an expression of thesocial fabric that linked different communities, as weremarriage, economic transactions, or social visits (seeBurch 1 998). Similarly, the conduct of warfare activi-ties did not exclude those other activities. Since allthose forms of culture contact could appear beyond(as well as within) ethnic and linguistic boundaries, "cul-ture change"—that is, the exchange and spread of "cul-ture elements"—was an almost necessary result of "trav-eling between continents."

One of the most obvious effects of culture contactis in the realm of language. Instances of bi- and multi-lingualism were quite common throughout the BeringStrait area. As mentioned above, some forms of bilin-gualism were an expression of one-sided relations;however, in many other cases (e.g., between the Alas-kan Inupiat and Siberian Naukan Yupiit Eskimo) therewere approximately equal levels of bilingualism, whichreflected more balanced social relationships. In addi-tion, all the languages of the area display a fair numberof borrowings in vocabulary and grammar. The exist-ence of previous "trade jargons" is likely, albeit poorlydocumented (cf. De Reuse 1994). Specific language-related exchanges took place in the realms of the be-stowal of personal names and the performance ofsongs. Inupiaq and Yupik personal names in the BeringStrait area are "recycled," that is, they are bestowed toa newborn after the death of its previous bearer; inaddition, each person can have multiple names, someof which stem from other communities. One specifi-cally interesting aspect of this regional system of nam-ing is the high frequency of Chukchi personal namesthat is found among the Naukan Yupiit Eskimo (and, toa lesser degree, among the Bering Strait Inupiat and St.Lawrence Island Yupik people). The preponderance ofChukchi personal names in the Naukan name pool isnot the result of Chukchi social dominance, but of thestructural properties of Chukchi and Eskinx) namingsystems, which are distinct but compatible (Schweitzerand Golovko 1997a). Songs and dances in the Bering

Strait area are "owned" by the individuals and com-munities who created them. They are, nevertheless,widely exchanged throughout the region, and songsare generally performed in their original language. Incontrast to personal names of "foreign origin," thesource of received songs and dances is generally wellremembered and usually acknowledged (see alsoKingston 2000).

While language-related exchanges and borrowingsare easier to detect, those in the realms of social orga-nization, religion, and material culture are often lessvisible. Nevertheless, there are several well-documentedcases in these spheres too. They range from the adop-tion of reindeer herders' dwellings by the coastal com-munities of the Chukchi Peninsula and St. LawrenceIsland' to the disintegrating effect of Inupiat bilateralkinship organization on the clan system of NaukanYupiit. Other examples include the adoption of syncre-tistic religious practices (e.g., a "revitalization move-ment" in Naukan in the 1 920s) and the abandonmentof others (e.g., the absence of "messenger feasts" onLittle Diomede Island). The above-mentioned forms ofculture contact allude to several distinct processes ofincorporating "foreign elements." We have arguedelsewhere for a preliminary model describing ideal-types of cultural exchanges in the Bering Strait area(Schweitzer and Golovko 1997b). This model proposesto take particular note of whether a certain culturalpractice is recognized as borrowed or not. Here it issufficient to state that even in the early 1990s, afteralmost 50 years of suspended direct contacts, the ef-fects of culture contact were ubiquitous in the BeringStrait region.

Returning to Boas and the Jesup Expedition, it seemsdifficult to grasp why a huge joint effort interested incultural relations between Asia and America had solittle to say about the Bering Strait region, a multi-eth-nic arena of diverse forms of culture contact and itseffects. Most of the forms and effects of culture con-tact across Bering Strait were at least as visible at theturn of the nineteenth century as they are today (and

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some of them would then have been much easier todocument). The remainder of this paper will shed somelight on why the very crossroads between the Old andNew World proved to be of marginal interest to theorganizer of the JNPE. First, though, it is necessary tobreak down this general question into at least twocomponents. The first is whether Boas, who never vis-ited the Bering Strait region, slighted the area in hissummary reports or whether this deficiency was anunfortunate by-product of the organization and logis-tics of theJNPE fieldwork in the area during 1 900-1.Secondly, what was the relationship between thecollected (and published) field data and the interpre-tations that Boas and other members of the Jesup Ex-pedition drew from them?

For analytical purposes, I will discuss the JNPE field-work monographs separately from the interpretationsbased on them. However, since there has never been(and never will be) a neat demarcation line betweendata and interpretation, this should not be misunder-stood as a naive form of positivism. First, I will brieflyreview the published monographs that resulted from(and, in one case, preceded) the JNPE. As a secondstep, I will survey the interpretational tools Boas andhis collaborators used to arrive at their conclusions.Finally, I will tackle the title question whether Boas andthe JNPE, in general, failed at the task of confrontingculture contact in the Bering Strait region.

The Published Field Data

The first thing to be mentioned is that the JNPE teamsdid not conduct any fieldwork on the Alaskan side ofBering Strait nor hardly anywhere else in Alaska (seeKrauss, this volume). Boas justified this circumstanceby referring to other available publications for the re-gion, such as those by Nelson (1 899), Murdoch (1 892),and others (Boas 1908:9).^ For the Alaskan side of BeringStrait, he certainly had first and foremost Nelson's "TheEskimo About Bering Strait" in mind, which was pub-lished in 1899, during the early phase of the JNPE." Thus,I will begin this section with a brief review of the book

5 2

that was seemingly considered an adequate substi-tute for extensive new fieldwork by Boas and his JNPEcrew.

Edward William Nelson (1855-1934) was a natu-ralist who took on a four-year assignment with the U.S.Army Signal Service in St. Michael, Alaska, in 1877.Although his main task was to provide meteorologi-cal observations, he agreed to collect ethnological in-formation and specimens for the Smithsonian Institu-tion in exchange for logistical and publication sup-port. Between 1877 and 1881, Nelson was able totravel extensively in the Yukon-Kuskokwim River Delta,the southern part of the Seward Peninsula, and into theIndian country along the Yukon River. In addition, in1 881 he took a trip on the Revenue Cutter Corwin toSt. Lawrence Island, the Chukchi Peninsula, Wrangel Is-land, and Northwest Alaska as far as Point Barrow(Fitzhugh and Kaplan 1982:32). Upon his return to Wash-ington, D.C., in the fall of 1881, he began to preparethe publication of his journals and notes; but ill healthdelayed the process considerably. Finally, in 1899, hismonumental monograph, 'The Eskimo About BeringStrait" appeared in the Eighteenth Annual Report ofthe Smithsonian Bureau of American Ethnology for theyears 1896-97.

It is not the purpose of this chapter to provide afull analysis of Nelson's anthropological results (seeLantis 1954; Fitzhugh 1983). Instead, I will focus onthe issue of culture contact, which Nelson had ampleopportunities to experience first-hand. Using just broadlinguistic labels of today, he dealt with various CentralAlaskan Yup'ik, Siberian Yupik, Naukan Yupik, and Inup-iaq groups and had additional short encounters withReindeer and Coastal Chukchi in Siberia, as well as withAthapaskan groups in interior Alaska. Using the nar-row concept of "traditional societies" (Burch 1980), hehad data from more than 20 such groups. His locationat St. Michael was ideal for observing real-time culturecontact among them; however, that was not whatNelson was interested in. Except for the Athapaskanand the Chukchi, all other Native societies of the

] 00 YEARS/ BERING STRAIT CULTURE CONTACT

region he covered were reduced in his publication toone label, namely the "western Eskimos." While Nelsonwas aware of some of the linguistic and social bound-aries in the region he surveyed (Nelson 1 899:24-6), heinterpreted them as merely dialect and tribal variationsof one ethnic group. Thus, the first chapter of his mono-graph starts out with the following statement:

The lives of these people adjacent to theTinne [Athapaskan - P. S.], as well as those ofthe Siberian coast who are in constantcontact with the Chukchi, have been some-what modified by their surroundings, al-though in their language and customs theyare still unmistakably Eskimo (Nelson1899:23).

It is a pity that'Nelson did not expand on this mysteri-ous phrase, "have been somewhat modified by theirsurroundings." These are exactly the forms and resultsof culture contact we are so interested in. There are,however, a few short sub-chapters, where he providedus with some information about the functional rea-sons of some forms of culture contact. His three-and-a-half-page account of "Trade and Trading Voyages"(Nelson 1899:228-32) offers a good review of the ex-tent of trade networks throughout the region at thetime. Similarly, his short account of "Wars" (Nelson1899:327-30) is a useful summary of traditional alli-ances and hostilities in the Bering Strait area. However,neither in those chapters nor in the rest of his book didhe try to account for the local cultural differences andtheir relation to culture contact. Most of the time, hisgeneralizing statements about "western Eskimo" cul-ture mirrors mainly the Central Alaskan Yup'ik area withwhich he was most familiar.

In the final analysis I have to agree with MargaretLantis' assessment that "about 250 pages of the[Nelson's] text are essentially an annotated museumcatalogue" and that "his presentation of the museumcollection of about 10,000 specimens still is unequaledamong Alaska Eskimo ones" (Lantis 1 954:1 3). The re-sults of Nelson's sojourn and monograph are stron-gest in the field of material culture, as in the case of his

fellow Smithsonian affiliate, John Murdoch (1 892). Thus,William Fitzhugh's comment that "Nelson's collections.. . can be used for scholarly study of interaction andchange across the ethnic, linguistic, and cultural bound-ary in eastern Norton Sound" (Fitzhugh 1983:34), nev-ertheless, cannot be fully executed outside the realmof material culture.

The two scholars who conducted fieldwork in north-eastern Siberia for the JNPE were Waldemar Jochelson(Vladimir lokhel'son, in Russian) and Waldemar Bogoras(Vladimir Bogoraz). While Jochelson worked mainlyamong the Koryak people in northern Kamchatka andamong the Even, Yukagir, and Sakha people of thecontemporary Republic of Sakha (Yakutia) and theMagadan Province, Bogoras conducted his field sur-veys mainly in Chukotka, including several locations atBering Strait. Waldemar Bogoras (1865-1936) was aRussian revolutionary whose first acquaintance withSiberia and its Native people was involuntary: he wasexiled to the mouth of the Kolyma River during theyears 1890-8. Like several of his fellow narodniki ex-iles, he began collecting ethnographic and folklore ma-terial from the Chukchi and other peoples, with whomhe was in contact (see more in Vakhtin 2001:78-82).The linguistic competence and ethnographic experi-ence acquired during those years made him an excel-lent choice for the JNPE Siberian team. In addition,Bogoras had already participated in a large ethno-graphic expedition to Yakutia, sponsored by the richgold miner and philanthropist Innokentii Sibiriakov inthe years 1895-97.

The fieldtrip for JNPE was conducted by Bogorasand his wife, Sofia Bogoras, over 12 months during theyears 1 900-1. Unfortunately, Bogoras had to cover anunreasonably broad area. As Igor Krupnik has recentlynoted , "he [Bogoras - P.S.] was mainly on the move. .. . he surveyed an area from the Bering Strait toKamchatka Peninsula, over a distance equal to a roundtrip from London to Sicily" (Krupnik 1996:40). Thus,when Bogoras finally reached the shores of the BeringStrait during the last months of his Siberian sojourn, he

p. p. SCHWEITZER

was unable to visit all the coastal villages as planned.Especially unfortunate was the fact that he did notmake it to the areas closest to the Alaskan mainland,particularly, the villages of Naukan, Uelen, and their sur-roundings, as he originally proposed to Boas (Vakhtin2001:83). However, it is worth mentioning that Bogoras

conducted that trip ("traveling half-way between con-tinents") in the "Native way".

The major result of Bogoras'JNPE participation washis three-part monograph TheChukcheeiBogoras 1904-9). Despite its mono-ethnic title, the massive work alsoprovides significant information about the Siberian Yupik

ROUTE-MAP, Jt&UP WORTH PAOIPIC EXPtOITIONThe red lines show the princijxvl rouies irnverx*?! Iiy iwirtie* in «he field (row 1S97 li> i(/>2 inclusive. In Nurlh America the juumey« of thediUcrtnt parties have w)t hwn inriitaltd strsiaratel)', the coumry having been coveretl in m> many diri-ctions : in Asia the ilnt-and-da.'ih line shows thecourse followed hy the Bogoras party ; the broken Sine, ihit of the Jochetson party ; the iolicl liiic. that of the Laufer jiarly.

6/A segment of the original map of tine Jesup Expedition activities, 1897- / 902, showing the routes ofBogoras' and Jochelson's parties in the Bering Sea area (Adapted from Boas / 903:72)

was able to reach St. Lawrence Island from the south-eastern coast of the Chukchi Peninsula. He traveled byNative skin-boat from Cape Chaplin to Cambell, on St.Lawrence Island in May 1901 and he spent a few dayson the island, before coming back by the same boat.That made Bogoras the only early ethnographer who

(whom Bogoras called Asiatic Eskimo) and, to a lesserdegree, the Koryak, Yukagir, Even, and Russian Creole.In accordance with other major "base-line ethnogra-phies" of the turn of the century, Bogoras managed totouch upon almost everything anthropologists weresupposed to be interested in: from fishing implements

54

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to funeral ceremonies, from shamanism to dog-breed-ing, and from children's games to Native customarylaw. Unlike his Alaskan predecessors Nelson and Mur-doch, he thus succeeded in providing a more holisticportrait of the society he studied and not an accountbiased primarily towards its material culture. His long-term experience in the area and his fluent knowledgeof the Chukchi language surely contributed to the trulyimpressive scope and quality of his work. In retrospect,one of the few major shortcomings of his monographwas also related to his prolonged stay in westernChukchi territory, among the reindeer herders of theKolyma River area. Throughout his book, there is amarked preponderance of information about the Rein-deer Chukchi, while the Maritime Chukchi (and SiberianYupik) are generally treated with much less attention.As Krupnik has mentioned, Bogoras continued through-out his career to look at Siberian Native life through aReindeer Chukchi lens (Krupnik 1996:43). In addition,Krupnik has aptly criticized Bogoras for representingMaritime Chukchi (and Siberian Yupik) social organiza-tion as much less structured than it proved to be bylater research (Krupnik 1996).

However, recognizing that shortcomings are quiteinevitable in a work of the scope of The Chukchee, in-stead, I want to focus on the most notable achieve-ments of the book. To me, those are the already men-tioned multi-ethnic focus and the extensive use of his-toric documents, both of which lend a truly diachronicquality to Bogoras' volume. It should be rememberedthat the predominant format of ethnographic mono-graphs at the time—including Boas' vision of the JNPEpublication series—was to treat a single ethnic groupas an isolated phenomenon that could be describedwithout much mention of other groups. The Chukchee;to the contrary, was characterized by an unusualamount of historical information. For example, Bogoras'50-page chapter, "Contact of the Chukchee with theRussians," has few equals in early 20th century eth-nographies. Bogoras did not limit his diachronic ap-proach to accounts of "colonial history," but applied it

to a variety of topics, such as the "origin of reindeerbreeding" or issues of shamanism.

In addition, Bogoras constantly challenged the nar-row confines of single-ethnic monographs. He not onlyreferenced inter-group and inter-ethnic relations in theabstract; but he also contributed hundreds of concreteillustrations of such relationships. For example, in dis-cussing "Mixed Marriages" (Bogoras 1904-9:591-5),he did not merely state that Chukchi men sometimesmarried Tungus (Even) women. Instead, he providedintricate details about how the problem of distinct mar-riage presentations (bride-service vs. bride-price) wassolved. Similarly, his sections about "Trade" (Bogoras1 904-9:53-69) and "Warfare'(1904-9:645-59)aboundin specific details of interethnic conduct. In sum. TheChukchee is not only a "world-class monograph" butone that provides ample concrete data about culturecontact in areas adjacent to Bering Strait.

Bogoras published several other volumes resultingfrom his participation in theJNPE. However, these weremainly collections of folklore (Bogoras 1910a, 1913,1917, 1918) or linguistic sourcebooks (Bogoras 1949).In addition, he wrote a huge assembly of articles; sincemost of them address specific topical problems anduse his JNPE materials mainly as illustrations, they willbe discussed in the following section.

Interpretations by Boas and Bogoras

At the turn of the twentieth century, the battle be-tween evolutionists and diffusionists was the definingmoment in anthropological debates (see Lee andGraburn, this volume). Boas was among the most vo-cal and influential critics of evolutionism, which haddominated the generation of scholars preceding him.^His article, "The Limitations of the Comparative Methodof Anthropology" (1896; abbreviated hereafter as "TheLimitations"), remains a textbook example of the "his-torical method" which dismisses approaches that treatall similar phenomena as the results of the "uniformworking of the human mind." Boas was, however, fromthe beginning a "moderate diffusionist." Already in "The

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Limitations" he demanded that the historical methodis applied to a "well-defined, small geographical terri-tory" and that "continuity of distribution as one of theessential conditions for proving historical connection"be observed (Boas 1 982 [1 940]:277). This caveat wasdirected at more radical diffusionists, many of whomwere strongly influenced by the Germananthropogeographer Friedrich Ratzel (as was, in fact,Boas himself). At the same time, Boas did not excludethe possibility of "independent invention," nor did hereject the "comparative method" entirely. Instead, hewas calling for careful historical investigations beforebuilding any sweeping models that rested on evolu-tion or diffusion.

This was very much Boas' mindset during the orga-nization and conduct of the JNPE. The plan for the ex-pedition can be seen as an attempt to apply the his-torical method, by selecting a well-defined geographi-cal territory and looking for continuities and discont-inuities of culture element distribution. As Boas statedafter the completion of the expedition, "if we approachthe problem of culture parallels from a purely psycho-logical and purely evolutionistic point of view, an in-vestigation or a problem, as the one before the Jesup-expedition, would seem unsolvable" (Boas 1908:5). Inother words, the JNPE would have never been designednor undertaken by an ardent evolutionist.

According to Harris (1968:278-80), around 1910,Boas began to change his general views about thepossibilities of finding general laws regarding culturaldevelopment. He became more skeptical about thepredictability of cultural processes and maintained thatthere is no necessary correlation between the devel-opmental stages of different aspects of culture. Thistheoretical development of Boas is important for ourpurposes. As mentioned above, his final report regard-ing the results of theJNPE was presented in 1908. How-ever, at that time a significant portion of individualmonographs stemming from the expedition was notyet published. It took until 1 926 for the final portion ofthe expedition field data Gochelson's final delivery of

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his Yukagir monograph) to appear in one of the lastissues undertheJesup Expedition series (whereasJochel-son's JNPE Yakut materials were only published in 1 933and outside of the expedition series). At that point inhis career, Boas had entirely abandoned every aspectof the comparative method, devoted himself to "his-torical particularism," and became more interestedin individual rather than in group processes (Harris1968:280-1).

It is also noteworthy that the final volume of theJNPE series (vol. XII, to be entitled "Summary and FinalResults"; Boas 1905:94) was never published. In a sense,the full interpretation of Bogoras' (and Nelson's) resultswas never accomplished by Boas. It could be arguedthat Boas' JNPE program reflected primarily his earlytheoretical preoccupations (as outlined in The Limita-tions"). By the time all the results were finally assembled.Boas' interests had significantly changed and, thus, adetailed summary and interpretation of data collectedunder a "past paradigm" was no longer desirable.

The question remains as to which aspects of theoriginal program might have become obsolete for Boas.Since we have no direct evidence from him on thesubject, I cannot make more than informed guesses.By reading through Boas' early reports about the JNPE,I was quite struck by the sheer spatial and temporalscope of the problems he intended to address. Farfrom staying within the "well-defined geographical ter-ritory" of the North Pacific region. Boas addressed ques-tions of culture history ranging from the southern tip ofSouth America to Europe and from the Paleolithic tothe recent past. If this is the "historical method," it surelyis history on a macro-scale. Boas was dealing withquestions such as the when and where of the origin ofEskimo culture; he compared the peoples of the Arcticand Northwestern North America to those of the south-ern part of North America; he hypothesized aboutMesoamerican influences in North America; he tried toassess the relative ages of different culture areas; heclassified the languages of northeastern Siberia in rela-tion to North American languages, etc. (Boas 1908).

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These questions seemed more appropriate in the writ-ing of an ardent diffusionist rather than of a moderateadvocate of the "historical method."

It might well be that the initial program of the JNPEwas in reality much more ambitious than Boas' cau-tionary theoretical prescriptions. Somehow, the stra-tegic location of the JNPE must have tempted Boas toaddress the "big questions" of culture history, such asthe peopling of the Americas. While his JNPE masterplan can be said to fit with his theoretical writings ofthe time, it also made room for much more far-reach-ing issues. One thing that even Boas' theoretical oppo-nents admit is that he held very high methodologicalstandards (see Harris 1 968). It is easy to imagine thatBoas realized that, however tempting the "big ques-tions" might be, the JNPE data did not provide morethan food for speculation. More in accordance withhis (especially, later) views, he eventually abandonedthe grand synthesis project. Instead, he went to prac-tice in the field of "historical particularism." However,either because of time constraints or lack of regionalinterest, he did not work with all the data compiled bythe JNPE. In fact, he primarily worked with materials onNorthwest coast societies, where he tried to recon-struct detailed historical sequences. The Bering Straitmaterial never received a similar treatment by Boas.

In contrast to Boas, Bogoras was for most of hiscareer an outspoken (although not always conscious)evolutionist. Traces of this approach can easily be foundin most of his writings, including "The Chukchee." There,before presenting materials on Chukchi religion, he pro-vides us with his views on the five "developmentalstages of primitive religious concepts" (Bogoras 1904-09:277-90). The model suggested by Bogoras dis-plays an eclectic mix of influences ranging from CharlesDarwin to Herbert Spencer to Edward B. Tylor. Althoughthose pages contain interesting ethnographic informa-tion, its presentation suffers from the straightjacketapproach of constructing a unilineal sequence of reli-gious concepts: from animism (a label he rejected) tosupernatural beings. In addition, Bogoras provided a

short comparative treatment of religious ideas amongthe Koryak and Itelmen, as compared to the Chukchi(Bogoras 1904-9:290-1). While the similarities betweenKoryak and Chukchi concepts seem to strengthenBogoras' evolutionistic argument, his final paragraphof that section indicates an implicit argument for diffu-sion. He pointed out that Chukchi and Eskimo folkloreshowed strong resemblances, while Koryak and Itelmenstories were closer to those of the American North-west coast (Bogoras 1904-9:291).

Other instances of evolutionistic leanings in TheChukchee can be found in Bogoras' treatment of socialorganization. For example, regarding the Chukchi "familygroup"—a group of kindred families—he suggests thatit "may perhaps be called an embryo of a clan" (Bogoras1904-9:541). However, despite the usage of suchterms as "group-marriage," The Chukchee, for the mostpart, stays free of putting Chukchi social organizationinto an evolutionary framework. Such a framework wasto be found in Bogoras' last publications, when Marx-ist evolutionist line demanded that his views fit intothe ruling dogmas such as "pre-clan" and "clan soci-ety" (see Bogoras n.d.: 292-6). His views about reli-gion, on the other hand, were consistently phrased indevelopmental terms (see Bogoras 1906, 1910b).

It has already been indicated that Bogoras wasnot opposed to explaining the distribution of cultureelements through diffusion and migration. This is espe-cially evident from a number of his articles publishedafter the completion of the JNPE. For example, hisRussian article "Ancient Migrations of Peoples in North-ern Eurasia and America," (Bogoras 1927) reads like acompendium of speculative population movementsthroughout the northern parts of Eurasia and NorthAmerica. While Boas and Bogoras seem to meet in thisrespect, there was a temporal hiatus between theirmacro-historical contributions. When Bogoras issuedhis major statements on the subject during the 1 920s(e.g., Bogoras 1924, 1927), Boas had already long aban-doned the search for the "big picture" of human cul-tural history.

p. p. SCHWEITZER

After reviewing Boas' and Bogoras' general ap-proaches, we still need to look at several specific as-sumptions that informed their work. One of them isthe already-mentioned "Eskimo Wedge theory," whichcan be called a direct result of the JNPE (Dumond, thisvolume; Freed et al. 1988:32). According to Boas' view(which was shared by Bogoras), Eskimo cultures origi-nated in Canada and were late arrivals to Alaska, wherethey "interrupted, at an early period, the communica-tion between the Siberian and Indian tribes" (BoasigOSigS-g)."^ unfortunately, this view of Bering Straitculture chronology disqualified the various Eskimo so-cieties of the region from being considered an intrinsicpart of the regional cultural network. Another specificassumption that informed Boas' (but not Bogoras')approach has at least to be mentioned, being that forBoas "culture contact" was limited to contact amongNative societies. He had no interest in the dramaticcultural processes that were taking place before theeyes of thejesup Expedition members in the field. Thisaspect of Boas' views —which is so difficult to grasp—has rightly been questioned by several other papers inthis volume (see Krauss, this volume; Lee and Craburn,this volume). Here it must suffice to state that Boas'concept of the relationship between science and poli-tics was ambiguous. While he is rightly remembered asa courageous enemy of racism, Boas always consid-ered his "political" views as being entirely "scientific."Thus, there was no room for a moralistic position, whichwould have been an almost inescapable preconditionor consequence of analyzing contemporary Native/non-Native interactions.

Conclusions

Let me now attempt at a preliminary synthesis of thearguments developed above. There is no reason tosuggest that Boas' lonely fieldworker on the Russianside of Bering Strait—^Waldemar Bogoras—failed thetask of documenting culture contacts in the region.On the contrary, his major account of theJNPE-trip, TheChukchee, contains many excellent descriptions of such

5 8

processes. After almost ) 00 years, this work contin-ues to be a "treasure chest" of information for scholarsinterested in the subject.

Unfortunately, things were different for the Alas-kan section of the region. Nelson's material culture-focused monograph could in no way match Bogoras'lively account. With the possible exception of tracingculture contact through objects of material culture,we are left today with few usable clues. It has to bestated, however, that Nelson's "job description" nei-ther at the time of his Alaskan fieldwork (1 877-81) norduring his writing for the Smithsonian (in the 1880sand 1890s) included what we would want to see mostin his monograph these days. Thus, to a certain de-gree, the "blame" should rather be put on Boas whoassumed that Nelson's' work in progress could/wouldbecome a valid substitute forJNPE fieldwork in Alaska.He seemed to have sensed that after the completionof the Jesup Expedition, when he stated that "unfortu-nately our knowledge of the Alaskan Eskimo is notthorough enough to permit of a definitive statementin regard to their culture" (Boas 1 905:98). However,we at least have to consider the institutional and po-litical pressure Boas was facing while lobbying for "his"expedition (Freed et al. 1988). It might well be thatkeeping good rapport with the Smithsonian Institu-tion, which had financed Murdoch's and Nelson's re-port, led him to abandon plans for independent field-work in Alaska.'

Although Bogoras and Boas are often portrayedas having belonged to mutually exclusive camps ofanthropological theory (evolutionism and historical par-ticularism, respectively), most of their synthesizing writ-ings on the subject adopt a strangely similar perspec-tive. Both show a particular interest in "grand culturehistory," which leaves no room for the study of con-crete culture history. In Bogoras' case, his interest inthe details of how neighboring groups interact seemsto have been satisfied by the completion of his JNPEmonographs. Further micro-historical analysis wasseemingly not a major concern to him. For Boas, macro-

100 YEARS/ BERING STRAIT CULTURE CONTACT

history held its fascination until around 1908; after that,he devoted much of his energies to local and detailedaccounts of historical processes. Unfortunately, theBering Strait region was never able to attract consider-able attention from this outstanding scholar. The "Es-kimo Wedge" theory created and defended by Boas,Bogoras, and others, certainly did not contribute tothe study of culture contact phenomena in the areaunder consideration. Since the Eskimo societies aroundBering Strait were considered to have "messed up thepuzzle" of culture history, instead of being interpretedas an intricate part of it, the heuristic value of the re-gion became negligible. Viewed from their "macro-scale" perspective of history, Bering Strait appearedtoo "narrow" as to allow a sweeping statement to beapplied to the North Pacific Rim.

Finally, Bogoras' detailed descriptions of Native/non-Native interactions in the Bering Strait region didnot attract Boas' analytical curiosity, since the latterthought them outside of the anthropologists' goals.Thus, another chance at understanding the mechanismsof culture contact and change was passed over.

The question phrased in the title of this paper—Failing at Bering Strait?—has yet to be addressed.While it is evidently quite easy to point out certainshortcomings some 100 years after the completionof the JNPE, I concede that it would be inappropri-ate to speak of "failure" regarding the expedition'saccomplishments in the Bering Strait region. Afterall, the research questions and interests of Boas,Bogoras, and the others who contributed to themega-size endeavor of the JNPE were shaped bythe dominant theories and paradigms of their time.Thus, we cannot condemn them for the fact thatthey did not pose or answer then many of our keyquestions of today. In the final analysis, there is noth-ing more telling than the fact that we are still de-bating their field data and theoretical positions andwill probably continue to do so for at least another100 years. Few of us can hope for a similar interestby succeeding generations of anthropologists, who

will perceive the shortcomings of our approachesall too plainly.

Acknowledgments

This article is a follow-up to a joint paper by Evgenii V.Colovko and myself presented at the conference "Con-structing Cultures Then and Now: A Centenary Confer-ence Celebrating Franz Boas and the Jesup North Pa-cific Expedition, 1 897-1997," November 1997, in NewYork City. I hereby want to acknowledge the inputEvgenii Colovko has provided on my anthropologicalperspectives, especially within the context of our jointresearch project "Traveling Between Continents." I alsowant to thank Stacie Mcintosh and Igor Krupnik foreditorial assistance and advice.

Notes

1. However, in the few villages with a mixedChukchi and Yupik population, such as Kiwak andUelen, Chukchi fluent in Yupik were quite common(see Krupnik and Chlenov 1 979).

2. To be more specific, coastal residentsadopted certain architectural principles of theyaranga, the traditional skin-covered dwelling ofthe Reindeer Chukchi. As its tundra precursor, thecoastal yaranga was an above-ground structurewhich featured an inner chamber (polog). In con-trast to the reindeer herders' dwelling, it was moresolid and not designed for frequent moves. Thisarchitectural shift only became possible once thecoastal residents received a steady supply of re-indeer skins (to cover the polog and other parts ofthe yaranga) from the tundra (Igor Krupnik, per-sonal communication, November 1998).

3. According to a map of proposed expedi-tion operations published in 1 897, fieldwork wasalso planned in Western Alaska and the Aleutians(see Fitzhugh and Krupnik 2001 :xvi; Krupnik andVakhtin, this volume).

4. In addition, he might have had JohnMurdoch's "Ethnological Results of the Point Bar-row Expedition" (1 892) in mind, which was alreadypublished by the time JNPE was in the planningstage. However, Murdoch's monograph is not onlysituated outside of our geographic range of inter-

P. p. SCHWEITZER

ests, but has hardly anything to offer on issues ofculture contact.

5. Since I am here primarily interested in Boas'treatment of culture change in the Bering Straitarea, I cannot provide an in-depth review of Boas'general contributions to anthropology. For recentcontributions to this vast body of literature seeBaker (1998), Cole (1999), Darnell (1998, 2001),as well as several contributions in Stocking (1 996)and Krupnik and Fitzhugh (2001).

6. Frederica de Laguna's statement (1 994:1 2)that Boas' views on the problem were already for-mulated in his famous early monograph "The Cen-tral Eskimo" (1888) can be extended. It could beargued that his general views on the homogene-ity of Eskimo culture, formed as they were by hisCentral Inuit field experience, made him uncriticalof Nelson's field data.

7. Boas had a long-standing but complex re-lationship with the Smithsonian National Museum.In 1887, Boas had a protracted dispute with themuseum's Otis Mason about how to properly dis-play museum artifacts (Cole 1995 [1985]:1 12-8).

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1 906 Religious Ideas of Primitive Man, from ChukcheeMaterial. In Internationaler Amerikanisten-Kongress,M.Tagung, Stuttgart 1904. Zweite Hdlfte. Pp. 129-35. Berlin: W. Kohlhammer.

1910a Chukchee Mythology. The Jesup North PacificExpedition, vol.8, pt. 1. Memoirs of the American Mu-seum of Natural History, 12. Leiden: E.J. Brill; NewYork: C.E. Stechert.

1910b K psikhologii shamanstva u narodov severo-vostochnoi Azii (Toward the Psychology of Shaman-ism among the Native Peoples of Northeastern Asia).Etnograficheskoe obozrenie 84-5:1 - 36.

1913 The Eskimo of Siberia. The Jesup North PacificExpedition, vol.8, pt.3. Memoirs of the American Mu-seum of Natural History 12. Leiden: E.J. Brill; NewYork: C.E. Stechert.

191 7 Koryak Texts. Publications of the American Ethno-logical Society, 5. Leiden.

1918 Tales of Yukaghir, Lamut, and Russianized Na-tives of Eastern Siberia. Anthropological Papers of theAmerican Museum of Natural /-//story/20(l ):3-l 48.

1925 Early Migrations of the Eskimo between Asiaand America. In Congres Internationaldes American-istes. Compte-Rendudela2leSession, DeuxiemePartie.Tenue a Goteborg en 1924. Pp. 216-35. CoteborgMuseum.

1927 Drevnie pereseleniia narodov v severnoi Evrazii iV Amerike (Ancient Human Migrations in NorthernAsia and in America). Sbornik Muzeia Antropologii iEtnografib: 37-62. Leningrad.

1949 Materialypo iazyku aziatskikh eskimosov{Materi-als Relating to the Language of the Asiatic Eskimo).Leningrad: Uchpedgiz.

n.d. Ocherki kul'tury narodov Sever a (Essays in the Cul-tures of the Peoples of the North). Unpublished manu-script. Archives of the Museum of Anthropology and Eth-nography (St. Petersburg, Russia); f. K. I, op. 1, No. 29.

Burch, Ernest S., Jr.

1980 Traditional Eskimo Societies in Northwest Alaska.In Alaska Native Culture and History. Yoshinobu Kotaniand William B. Workman, eds. Pp. 253-304. Senri Eth-nological Studies, 4. Osaka, Japan: National Mu-seum of Ethnology.

1 998 International Affairs. The Cultural and NaturalHeritage of Northwest Alaska, vol.7. Produced forNANA Museum of the Arctic and U.S. National ParkService, Alaska Region.

Cole, Douglas

1995 [ 198 5] Captured Heritage: The Scramble for North-west Coast Artifacts. Norman: University of OklahomaPress.

1 999 Franz Boas: The Early Years, 1858-1906. Seattle:University of Washington Press.

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Darnell, Regna

1 998 And Along Came Boas: Continuity and Revolutionin Americanist Anthropology. Amsterdam: JohnBenjamins.

2001 Invisible Genealogies: A History of Americanist An-thropology. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.De Laguna, Frederica

1994 Some Early Circumpolar Studies. In CircumpolarReligion and Ecology: An Anthropology of the North. T.Irimoto and T. Yamada, eds. Pp. 7-44. Tokyo: Uni-versity of Tokyo Press.

De Reuse, Wlllem J.

1994 Siberian Yupik Eskimo: The Language and Its Con-tacts with Chukchi. Salt Lake City: University of UtahPress.

Fitzhugh, William W.

1983 Introduction. In Edward W. Nelson, The Eskimoabout Bering Strait. Pp. 5-106. Washington, DC:Smithsonian Institution Press.

Fitzhugh, William W., and Susan A. Kaplan

1982 Inua: Spirit World of the Bering Sea Eskimo. Wash-ington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press.

Fitzhugh, William W., and Igor Krupnik

2001 Introduction. In Gateways. Exploring the Legacyof the Jesup North Pacific Expedition. Igor Krupnik andWilliam W. Fitzhugh, eds. Pp. 1-16. Contributions toCircumpolar Anthropology, 1. Washington, DC: Arc-tic Studies Center.

Freed, Stanley A., Ruth S. Freed, and Laila

Williamson

1988 Capitalist Philanthropy and Russian Revolution-aries: The Jesup North Pacific Expedition (1897-1902). American Anthropologist 90(]y.7-24.

Harris, Marvin

1968 The Rise of Anthropological Theory: A History of

Theories of Culture. New York: Thomas Y. Crowell.Kingston, Deanna M.

2000 Siberian Songs and Siberian Kin: Indirect Asser-tions of King Islander Dominance in the Bering StraitRegion. Arctic Anthropology 37{2y.3&-5].

Krupnik, Igor I.

1996 The 'Bogoras Enigma': Bounds of Culture andFormats of Anthropologists. In Grasping the Chang-ing World: Anthropological Concepts in the PostmodernEra. V. Hubinger, ed. Pp. 35-52. London: Routledge.

Krupnik, Igor I., and Mikhail A. Chlenov

1979 Dinamika etnolingvisticheskoi situatsii u aziat-skikh eskimosov: konets XIX veka-1970-e gg. (Dy-namics of the Ethno-linguistic Status of the AsiaticEskimo: from the late 19"^ century until the 1970s).Sovetskaia Etnografiia (2): 19-29. Moscow.

Krupnik, Igor, and William W. Fitzhugh, eds.

2001 Gateways: Exploring the Legacy of the Jesup NorthPacific Expedition, 1897-1902. Washington, DC: Arc-

tic Studies Center, National Museum of Natural His-tory, Smithsonian Institution.Lantis, Margaret

1954 Edward William Nelson. Anthropological Papers

of the University of Alaska 3( 1): 5-16.Murdoch, John

1892. Ethnological Results of the Point Barrow Expedi-tion. 9th Annual Report of the Bureau of Ethnology forthe Years 1887-1888. Washington, DC: GovernmentPrinting Office.

Nelson, Edward William

1899 The Eskimo about Bering Strait. 18th Annual Re-port of the Bureau of American Ethnology for the Years1896-1897, pt. 1. Washington, DC: Government Print-ing Office.

Schweitzer, Peter P.

1997 Traveling Between Continents: Native Con-tacts Across the Bering Strait, 1898-1948. ArcticResearch of the United States 11: 68-72.

Schweitzer, Peter P., and Evgenii Golovko

1995a Contacts Across Bering Strait, 1898-1948.(Traveling Between Continents, Phases One and Two).Report Prepared for the U.S. National Park Service,Alaska Regional Office.

1 995 b Traveling Between Continents: The Social Or-ganization of Interethnic Contacts Across Bering Strait.The Anthropology of East Europe Review 1 3(2):5(3-5.

1997a Local Identities and Traveling Names: Inter-ethnic Aspects of Personal Naming in the Bering StraitArea. Arctic Anthropology 34(1): 167-80.

1 997b Culture Contact in the Bering Strait Area: OpenQuestions of Jesup I and Contemporary Approaches.Paper presented at the conference "Constructing Cul-tures Then and Now: A Centenary Conference Cel-ebrating Franz Boas and the Jesup North Pacific Ex-pedition, 1897-1997," November 1997, New York.

2001 Pamiat' o voine: konstruirovanie vneshnego kon-flikta V kul'ture etnicheskikh obshchnostei Beringovaproliva (Memory of the War: Constructing OutsideConflict in the Ethnic Cultures of the Bering StraitRegion). In Trudy fakul'teta etnologii Evropeiskogouniversiteta v Sankt-Peterburge. Pp. 26—37. St. Pe-tersburg: Evropeiskii Universitet.

2003 Levels of Inequality in the North Pacific Rim: Cul-tural Logics and Regional Interaction.. In: Hunter-Gath-erers of the North Pacific Rim. J. Habu,J.M. Savelle, S.Koyama and H. Hongo, eds. Pp. 83-101. Senri Eth-nological Series, 63. Osaka, Japan: National Museumof Ethnology.

Stocking, George W., Jr., ed.

1996 Volksgeist as Method and Ethic: Essays onBoasian Ethnography and the German Anthropologi-cal Tradition. History of Anthropology, 8. Madison:University of Wisconsin Press.

p. p. SCHWEITZER

I

7/ Jochelson's first expedition camp at the village ofKushka on the Sea of Okhotsk Coast, summer 1900. DinaJochelson-Brodsky is sitting in the middle; a tall man standing to her left is Norman Buxton (?) (AMNH 4188)

63

8/The transport of the JNPE collections near Yakutsk, East Siberia, spring 1902. Photographer, Waldemar Jochelson(AMNH 1755)

64

9/ Waldemar Bogoras, with the expedition collection freight ready for shipping out of Novo-Mariinsk, summer1901. Note the label on one of the crates: "Jessup (sic!) Expedition. Jochelson. Vladivostock via Nagasaki." Othercrates carry label "Anadyr" (in Cyrillic) and a Russian double-head eagle imperial seal (AMNH 22332)

/ 0/Jochelson's reindeer team with the JNPE collections, East Siberia, 1901 (?) (AMNH4206)

66

/ //Jesup Expedition Siberian collections displayed at the AMNH. Photographer, R.E. Dahlgren (AMNH 31003)

6 7

12/ Example of old Eskimo twined basketry (pack sack) issran (Central Yup'ik). Collected byJames W. VanStone on Nunivok Island, 1952 (UAM 554-5446)

68

14/Closeup of grass-coiling technique(Reprinted from: Otis Mason 1902, Fig.] 31).

/ 5/ Closeup oftwined-grass technique(Reprinted from: Otis Mason 1902, Fig.] 52)

] 6/ Miner Bruce basi<etfrom Kotzebue Sound. Pho-tographer, Aniba] Rodriguez(AMNH cat. #60-2324)

/ 7/Early coiled beach-grass basket. Collected by Lt. CM. Stoney on Putnam or Kobuk River,northern Alaska, 1887 (NMNH cat. #127891)

70

19/ Eskimo in skin boats (umiaks^ ready to trade with the passing ship. Port Clarence, Alaska, 1899. HarrimanExpedition (NMM P-l 1078)

7 1

RUSSIAN.TRADE..GOODS

\

Sakha/Yakut

160

/

-► Reindeer skins

^ Maritime products: sea mammaloil, seal and walrus skins, ivory ;

^ Land peltries:sable,fox (Siberia);fox, beaver, lynx, marten (Alaska) /Manufactures, etc.: clothing,pipes, bowls, beadwork, dogs,berries, wood, jade, chertO Major trade centers

180

Yukagir

Evenk

\

Nizhnekolymsk

East Siberian Sea I

Wrangel Is.

In**'

Yukagir,

Okhotsk^

'Evenk

/

Even //ll

/J.

ChukchiMarkovo

Anadyri

/

50 / Ncgidal TSakhalin

AlbazinV?. r"'"^^''^''' ^"^"f'" ■

V

lirn,

V'tof,

f It'elmenJ

jizhic

Chukchi

Qulfof ^Anadyr '^i^

Koryak

Nizhne Kamchatsk

AMERICANWHALERS

Bolsheretskf

Petropavlovsk

Ci. Aleut

Kuril Is.

PACIFIC OCEAN

20/ North Pacific-Sibehan-Alaskan Trade Systems, ca. / 775-1900. Adapted from Fitzhugh and Crowell 1988:236-37, withrevisions.

72

140

Commercial tradegoods: Russian traders (tobacco,break tea, beads, iron implements,firearms, clothing); Chinese andJapanese traders (tea, beads, porcelaifirearms, l<nives, clothing); Hudson BayCompany (blankets, tobacco, firearms,knives, and axes); American whalers(alcohol,firearms, ammunition,woodem boats, tobacco, clothing).

Limit of polar ke

Trade goods moved from east to west, and north to south, creating a crossroads of linked cultures across the Bering Sea area.

7 3

20/ North PadPc-Sibehari-Alaskan Trade Systems, cc. 1775-1900. Adapted from Fitzhugh and Crowell 198S:236}1 • Tr.de goods moved from east to west, and north to south, creating a crossroads of linked cultures across the Bering Sea area.

72

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

2// Sfl/V/f /.OM/rence Island coiled beach-grass tray. Collected by Dr. Riley D. Moore, 1912(NMNH cat. #280637)

22/ Chukchi basket. Collected byWaldemar Bogoras, Jesup NorthPacific Expedition, 1900-01. Pho-tographer, Am'bal Rodriguez (AMNHcat. #70-7952)

7 4

75

24/ Koryak coiled grass basket. Collected by Waldemar and Dina Jochelson, Jesup NorthPacific Expedition, 1900-01. Photographer, Antbal Rodriguez (AMNH cat. # 70-3932, 70-3352)

25/Koryak coiled willow root basket. Collected by Waldemar and Dina Jochelson, Jesup North PacificExpedition, 1900-01. Photographer, Am'bal Rodriguez (AMNH cat. # 70-3195)

76

26/Chinese tea basket, bamboo with porcelain tea cups. Collected by Berthold Laufer, Jesup North Pacific Expedi-tion, 1898-99. Photographer, Anfbal Rodriguez (AMNH cat. # 70-2638)

27/Ainu basket (ter\k\). Collectedby Bashford Dean, in HokkaidoShikiu, 1901 (AMNH cat. #70-4091 A&B)

7 7

28/Koryak basket makers at work. Waldemar Jochelson (Dina Jochelson-Brodsky?), photographer, 1900-01 (AMNH1576)

78

[diffusion and (^.oionial /\ntl-iropo!ogL):

"J^heones of CZ-hange in the (^ontext of Jesup 1

MOLLY LEE

NELSON H. H. GRABURN

The centennial of the Jesup North Pacific Expedition isa fitting occasion on which to reexamine the constructof diffusion, which has lain dormant since the grandtheories of the 19th century fell from anthropologicalgrace. Without question, one of Franz Boas' main inter-ests in verifying the Asian origins of North Americanindigenous cultures was to chart the distribution ofcultural elements across Siberia and into Alaska (Boas1903:73). Nevertheless, Jesup Expedition publications,and those by Boas himself, map the spread of suchelements among the Native cultures of Siberia, but areuniformly unenlightening on links across Bering Strait.

The overarching argument of this paper is that dif-fusion theory never reached its full potential in JesupExpedition publications because the Boasian modelused by its investigators failed to incorporate theagency of World System Theory (Wallerstein 1974).Their perspective ignored hybrid cultural forms emerg-ing from the cross fertilization of the North Pacific in-digenous peoples with the world system into whichthey were linked by the fur trade, the Yankee whalingindustry, and the other forms of commerce that esca-lated across the North at the turn of the 20th century.Whereas Boas and his contemporaries discussed insome detail Native-Native contacts, they bracketedout the trans-Beringian connection, a route largely con-trolled by Western traders and whalers, because atthat time, Native-Western interactions did not fall withinthe scope of anthropology (see also Schweitzer, thisvolume). We use a case study of the transmission of

two hybrid forms of coiled basketry across Siberiaand Alaska through the agency of the world sys-tem to illustrate our point.

The World System and the Spread of CoiledBasketry across Siberia and Bering Strait

The hypothetical spread of coiled basketry across Si-beria from two different sources, the Chinese borderand the Kamchatka Peninsula, underscores the pivotalrole of the world system in the diffusion of culturaltraits in the areas studied by the Jesup Expedition. Italso makes clear the contribution that material culturestudies can make to our understanding of culture his-tory. In an era when most branches of anthropologyhave abandoned the search for relationships betweenthe cultural forms of one group and another, materialculture studies and archaeology have retained this ap-proach, not out of any belief that it might lead to thediscovery of "Ur-forms," but because the cultural di-mensions of material objects can only be understoodby charting their variants through time and space. Ourresearch into the spread of coiled basketry across Si-beria and into Alaska, for example, illustrates how thefailure to take non-Native agency into considerationcreated an artificially static picture of culture changein the North when the reality was both complex andinfinitely protean.

Aboriginally, Alaskan Eskimo people from BristolBay to Barrow made basketry and matting in thetwined technique (Fig. 12). Between 1878 and 1881,

79

however, Edward W. Nelson collected two types ofcoiled basketry in the region of Bering Strait (Fig. 1 3)for which there was no archaeological precedent (Lee1995:58; Nelson 1899:202-5). Coiling is completelydifferent from twining. Twining involves twisting twoflexible weft strands around a set of rigid warp ele-ments. Coiling, by contrast, consists of overwrappinga foundation of one or more fibers with a weft strandand at the same time securing one revolution of thecoil to the next (Figs. 14, 1 5).

Nelson's findings of the newly appearing coiledbasketry around Bering Strait were soon joined by thoseof others, such as Miner Bruce on the northern edge ofthe Seward Peninsula (Fig. 16) and Murdoch at PointBarrow (Murdoch 1892:326-7; VanStone 1980:50-1). The first type of coiled basketry to appear in Alaskawas made of beach grass {Elymus mollis), and spiraledfrom the center of the base in a technique known asbundle coiling (Fig. 1 7). The other, made of willow-root, is constructed in the single-rod, non-interlockingcoiling technique (Fig. 18; see Mason 1904/1972:247c). The only ethnic group near the Eskimo peopleto use any form of coiling was the Athabaskan Indi-ans, who made single-rod willow-root baskets in thesame technique as those in the Nelson collection; how-ever, none is known to predate them (Lee 1995:59).

Given the constant flow of traffic, both Native andnon-Native, across Bering Strait during the whaling andtrading era of the late-nineteenth century (Fig. 19), thenext logical place to look for the sources of the twotypes of Eskimo coiled ware is in Siberia.

Trade Routes between Siberia and Alaska

Establishing a connection between Alaskan Eskimo andSiberian coiled basketry depends on demonstratingtechnological similarities between them and a pos-sible means of their transmission. In a global sense,Alaska was the final meeting point of the world-encir-cling capitalist trading system linking Europe and Asia.By 1 750, Russian fur traders and commercial huntershad moved across Siberia as far south as Kamchatka,

as far north as Chukotka (the Chukchi Peninsula), andas far east as Alaska (Fisher 1 943). At the same time,the North American arm of the fur trade, in the form ofthe Hudson Bay Company, was approaching Alaskafrom the East, reaching British Columbia by 1843 andFort Yukon in the interior Alaskan Arctic by 1847 (Fig.20).

More immediately, Alaska was directly connectedto Siberia by Native and western commerce by thelate nineteenth century. As Dorothy J. Ray has put it,the waters of Bering Strait functioned as "an intercon-tinental highway, its coastal fringes occupied bypeoples who had more or less the same way of life"(Ray 1975:10). In the ice-free summertime, both peopleand commodities moved back and forth by this routein large skin boats known as umiaks. European tradegoods had reached the coast of Alaska via Siberiawell before the arrival of the first white explorers (Ray1975:197). Thus the presence of Europeans and theproliferation of imported goods they brought alongserved to stimulate—but not initiate—a pre-existingpractice of tapping into a world system of trade.

Certain groups in the Bering Strait region were cen-tral to trans-Beringian trade, notably the Chukchi onthe Asian side and in Alaska, the Eskimo people of thecoastal settlements along Norton and Kotzebuesounds and the strategically located St. Lawrence, King,Big and Little Diomede, and Sledge islands (Bogojav-lensky 1969; VanStone 1980:10). By 1900, further-more, Siberian Yupik Eskimo and Chukchi, were cross-ing the strait every summer in skin boats to participatein the trade fairs that had become annual events onKotzebue Sound, Port Clarence, and at other locations(Burch 1988:234-40; 1998:151-62). Here, as manyas 2000 Native people congregated to trade.Though there was exchange of indigenous prod-ucts such as reindeer and sealskins, the trade alsoincluded imported Western goods. At this time, BeringStrait was the locus of both indirect and directNative-Western trade. After 1848, Yankee whalersalso acted as middlemen and took on Eskimo crew

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members on the Alaskan side before they crossed toSiberia (Bogoras 1 904-9:64; Jochelson 1908:808).Sailors from the whaling ships also participated in theNative trade fairs, and later, when the baleen marketfaltered, many whalers became traders, exchangingwestern goods for furs on both sides of Bering Strait(Fig. 23; see Bockstoce 1986:180-204). It seems safeto conclude, then, that Natives on both sides of BeringStrait participated in a turn-of-the-century version of aworld system and that this system provided a well-established route by which artifacts, including baskets,could have traveled from Siberia to Alaska. (Ray 1975:97-9; VanStone 1980:9-11).

Coiled Basketry

Both bundle-coiled grass and single-rod coiled willow-root baskets were made by the Siberian Yupik, Chukchi,and Koryak people of this region. These baskets sharesimilarities in shape, decorative designs and other tech-nical features with their Alaskan counterparts.

Bundle-coil grass baskets were commonly madeby the Siberian Yupik people of St. Lawrence Island(Moore to Ales Hrdliaeka, 21 December 1912, NAA-NMNH 55962; Moore 1923:361), by the reindeer andmaritime Chukchi (Bogoras 1904-9:225,228), and theKoryak Qochelson 1908:636). According to today'sSt. Lawrence Yupik elders, baskets there were undeco-rated. The few known examples are made with an even-ness of stitch characteristic of trade baskets soldaround Bering Strait at the turn of the twentieth cen-tury (Fig. 21). Three grass baskets securely documentedto the Chukchi are known, all reminiscent of AlaskanEskimo coiled ware. One, collected by Bogoras, servesas a base for a leather drawstring bag, as do earlygrass and willow-root baskets on the Alaskan side(Bogoras 1904-9:224-8). The basket is decorated withsimple geometric designs also reminiscent of Alaska(Fig. 22). Two later Chukchi grass baskets share ovoidand rounded shapes similar to Alaskan Eskimo ex-amples. Koryak grass baskets are considerably moreaccomplished. Jochelson (1908:631) reports only

M. LEE AND N. H.H. CRABURN

indigenous uses for them; but the repetitive designsand mass-produced quality on fifteen examples in theAmerican Museum of Natural History (AMNH) collec-tion suggests that they were almost certainly made tosell to outsiders, a practice that was already commonat that time (Fig. 24).

Sources of Siberian andAlasl<an Coiled Basketry

The distribution of the two types of coiled basketryamong the Siberian Yupik, the Chukchi, and the Koryakpeople suggests that these techniques were probablynot much older on the eastern side of Bering Straitthan on its western shore. Furthermore, the archaeo-logical record of northeastern Siberia parallels that ofAlaska: twined ware appears but coiling is absent(Sergei Arutiunov, personal communication to M.L.,1994). What explanations can be found for the sud-den appearance of coiling? Certainly, the broadestanswer is that the various northeastern Siberian groupswere all interlinked through trade. The Chukchi areknown to have traded with the Koryak, Yukagir, andEven (Antropova and Kuznetsova 1964:803). Chukchiwomen apparently had only recently picked up bas-ketmaking from Russianized Natives at trade fairs(Bogoras 1904-9:228). Most northeastern Siberiangroups also bartered directly or indirectly with West-erners and others from outside the region (Stepanovaet al. 1964:792-3). Assuming that knowledge of thesetwo coiled basketry techniques could have been in-troduced from elsewhere, the historical record sug-gests that they may have arrived in Siberia from twodifferent localities to the South. Moreover, the impetusfor their appearance is intimately linked to the spreadof non-Native goods through trade and commerce.

Willow-Root Basketry and the Culture of Tea

The two known Koryak willow-root baskets withstepped lids and stick starts show strong affinities withlidded willow baskets collected elsewhere in Siberia(Fig. 25). Bogoras collected a basket from RussianizedNatives living along the Anadyr River valley, north and

8 1

east of the maritime Koryak that is strikingly similar tothe Koryak willow baskets. Woven in the same singlerod, non-interlocking coiling, the lozenge-shaped,stepped-lid was collected with tea-cups and tea para-phernalia inside. Possibly, the Koryak willow-root bas-kets were also used for this purpose. The Koryak wereknown to value porcelain teacups, which were "pre-served as treasures in special boxes" Cochelson 1 908:580). Moreover, using similarly shaped and wovenbaskets for the storage of fragile tea ware seems tohave been widespread in Siberia. Among the Khantypeople in Western Siberia, for example, single-rod wil-low baskets were similarly used for storing tea ware(Popov 1955:106, Plate 20).

There is a possible outside source for this practice.During the 19th century the Chinese exported porce-lain tea sets in coiled baskets (Fig. 26). That Siberianpeoples would have seen the Chinese type, or onederiving from the Chinese type, is certainly possible.

Bundle-coiled Crass Basketry

The coiled grass basketry that appeared in Alaska andnortheastern Siberia at the same time as willow-rootbaskets seems to have a related source. Its closestaffinity is with the few known examples of Ainu coiledbasketry (Craburn and Lee 1999; Saito 1995). The strik-ing similarities between the twined basketry of theAinu, the northeastern Siberians, and the Alaskan Es-kimo have long been noted (Mason 1904:402;Lawrence Dawson, personal communication to ML andNC, 1986); but a careful analysis of relationships be-tween Ainu and northeastern Siberian coiled grass wareis the subject of future research.

The few examples of Ainu coiled ware that areknown closely resemble Koryak baskets in technique,shape, and decoration (Fig. 27). The historical literatureattests to frequent contacts between Kurile Ainu andKamchatka peoples. It documents trade links betweenKoryak and Kurile Ainu (but not between the Kurileand Hokkaido Ainu), but disagrees on whether coiledbasketry might have traveled by this route. In the fu-

8 2

ture we plan to focus on this complex problem.

Discussion: Boasian Models of Change

What, then, does the example of the sporadic spreadof coiled basketry across the North Pacific area, fromSiberia to Alaska, suggest about Boas's theories ofdiffusion? Let us step back for a moment to considertheories of culture change as expounded by Franz Boas,the leading anthropological organizer and theoreticianof the Jesup Expedition.

Early in his career. Boas was very open to the "prin- •ciple of the theory of evolution. . . [which] opens thevast field of natural sciences to the historical method"(Boas 1889, in Stocking 1982:67). Thus, he claimed,the understanding of a people not only required knowl-edge of their history, but of the history of their ances-tors, so that there is a "continuity of inventions andideas from the level of primitive people up to our owntime." Furthermore, he asserted at the time, becausethe histories of any one area are undoubtedly in-complete, any approach to local history would al-ways have to rely on the comparative method, thatis, to draw its conclusions with the aid of data fromother areas assumed to be at comparable evolu-tionary levels.

As further ethnological data became available, itgrew increasingly difficult to uphold the integrity ofthese evolutionary levels and their strict placement ina universal evolutionary hierarchy. For instance, Boas'own data on the family system of the Inuit people ofBaffin Island (Boas 1888), confirmed the anomalousfinding that their kinship-terminology system placedthem at the same "level" as Euro-Americans. Thus, inhis famous article, "The Limitations of the ComparativeMethod of Anthropology" (Boas 1896), he rejected asunscientific the possibility of both completing the evo-lutionary history of mankind and the search for ulti-mate origins of social customs and technologies. In itsplace, he privileged historical particularism, stressingdetailed knowledge of local ethnological histories, tobe gathered from the fast-disappearing Native elders

100 YEARS/ THEORIES OF CULTURE CHANCE

in the rapidly changing milieu of Indian and other tribesunder the imperial sway.

While carrying out his own detailed ethnographicfieldwork on the Northwest Coast, and being awareof the equally detailed work of others in the region(Emmons 1903, 1991) and further north (e.g. Murdoch1892; Nelson 1899), Boas foresaw the possibility ofputting together these local histories—these individualpieces of the ethnological jigsaw puzzle—into largerregional histories. In the North Pacific area. Boas plannedthe Jesup Expedition as such a large-scale researchproject by choosing those pieces of this geographicalpuzzle that required fitting in place. In the first volumeof the JNPE publications (1898) that is, after only oneseason of expedition fieldwork, he placed the effortwithin a larger universal frame by stating, "We must, sofar as we can, reconstruct the actual history of man-kind, before we can hope to discover the laws under-lying that history." (Boas 1898:1). In other words, in-stead of using the laws of the comparative method tofill in the gaps in reconstructing local histories, it shouldbe the other way round, with the construction of com-parative laws being the end point of all human histori-cal research.

As to specific methods for construction of particu-laristic and regional histories. Boas was unfortunatelyrather unclear both in defining and assigning the rela-tive importance of migration versus diffusion, and aboutrelating actual field data to either proposition. In thisfirst jesup Expedition volume, he generalized "In short,historical changes of far-reaching importance took placelong before the tribes became known to history. Theyimply mixture of blood, as well as exchange of culturalachievement" (Boas 1898:6).

In 1903, in his overview article in the AmericanMuseum Journal about the results of the jesup Expedi-tion, after the fieldwork had been conducted. Boasessentialy plagiarized himself. Apart from adding de-scriptions of the later field seasons, the article is other-wise word for word identical with his 1898 introduc-tory piece, with the exception that "Franz Boas" has

become "Prof. Franz Boas" or "Professor Boas." (1903:78,82). His preliminary conclusions, which highlight theimportance not of diffusion but of invasive migrationand gradual differentiation (akin to linguistic drift?) dueto slow spreading migration, are:

The unity of the race was much greater informer times than it is now; that the invasion[migration] of eastern tribes in America, suchas the Eskimo, Athapaskan and Salish, and ofthe western and southern tribes in Asia, suchas Yakut and Tungus, have disturbed theformer conditions [i.e. of the contiguity ofthe Chukchi, Koryak, Yukagir, and the Indiansof the American northwest coast]. Neverthe-less, enough remains to lead us to think thatthe tribes of this whole area must be consid-ered as a single race or at least that theirculture is a single culture [changed by'gradual differentiation'?]. Thus the jesupExpedition seems to have established theclose relationship between the peoples ofAsia and America (Boas 1 903:1 1 5).

The following year, in a major address on "The His-tory of Anthropology" (1904), Boas was more explicit.He differentiated between "the historical method,which endeavors to reconstruct the actual history ofmankind; and the other, the generalizing method, whichattempts to establish laws" (ibid:514). He related howthese two had come into conflict, how they are funda-mentally opposed, and how "all scientists were equallyguilty of premature theories of evolution based onobserved homologies and supposed similarities"(ibid:516). He then considered the "psychic causes" ofmen's propensity to evolve through a fixed evolution-ary sequence of stages, as well as "the influence ofgeographical environment... [where] the main stressis laid on the causes which bring about modificationsof the fundamental and identical traits" (ibid:51 7). Hecontrasted "independent origins [i.e., evolution of thesame stages and associations in different places—ML,NC]... and transmission from one part of the world toanother" while warning readers about Ratzel's claimthat "all sameness of cultural traits must be accountedfor by transmission." He concluded that "it requiresactual investigation into the individual history of such

M. LEE AND N. H.H. CRABURN

83

customs to discover the causes of their present distri-bution" (ibid:519) and that "the grand system of theevolution of culture, that is valid for all humanity, islosing much of its plausibility" (ibid:522).

In later publications touching on the results of theJesup Expedition, Boas concluded "many of the cul-tural elements that are widely spread in the Old Worldhave found their way to America" (Boas 1 925:22-3). Inanother paper, he was even more vague: "what is com-mon to the two Americas [in comparison with 'funda-mental traits of Old World culture'—ML, NG]," he wrote,"may be due as well to diffusion as to antiquity. Fur-thermore, most generalized traits of culture may havedeveloped independently in most areas" (Boas1 933:363). Few of Boas' observations on Old and NewWorld connections as we have seen, are closely rea-soned enough to see him testing theory against data.Of interest in light of the subject of this paper, Boasdeclined to consider the distribution of any form ofbasketry out of the misconception that it was unknownto the Eskimo people: "Less certain," he says, "are theconclusions to be drawn from the distribution of weav-ing, which is present in all parts of the Old World, butseems to be absent among the Eskimo" (Boas 1 925:24).

Boas and his contemporaries did not focus on theactual mechanisms of diffusion. This came up a gen-eration later in anthropological theory, particularly inthe acculturation literature (Redfield et al. 1934; Schweit-zer, this volume). In the North Pacific area, various mecha-nisms of "pre-capitalist" exchange had been recorded,including "silent trade," armed exchange, begging, andboasting (Burch 1988:234-8). By the beginning of thenineteenth century, trade had become more routin-ized, with regular trade fairs, units of currency, credit,and so on, all of which were known to the Jesup Expe-dition researchers. It is probably true that tea drinking,tea sets, coiled baskets for tea sets, and the techniqueof coiling itself followed these well-worn routes.

At the turn of the twentieth century, it was ac-ceptable in American academic circles to seek expla-nations, whether diffusionary or evolutionary, only

among cultures having "pure" Native culture elements.The assumption was that such cultures were on theedge of extinction; thus it was they who demandedscientific attention. As a result, Boas for the most partstudiously ignored evidence of Native-Western tradeand of hybrid forms and said little about the hybrid(Creolized) peoples who produced and transmittedthem; the one exception was his early interest in themusic of urban Indian songs in Vancouver, performedin Chinook jargon (see Jacknis, this volume). In fact,turn-of-the-century American collectors of materialculture, for instance, the American Museum of NaturalHistory and the Smithsonian Institution, boasted thatthey had rejected genres that bore any evidence ofcontact with the outside world (Craburn 1996:12-3).

We must draw a line, however, between Boas thetheorist and organizer, and his seasoned though rela-tively untrained and politically idealistic Russian exilefield workers, Bogoras and Jochelson. These Russianswere critical of the Tzar's administrative policies in thearea and were well aware of the negative impact ofcolonialism. Their detailed ethnographies mentionedhybrid cultural forms without placing them in an evolu-tionary or diffusionary framework; however they didnot give too much detail on the multi-cultural commu-nities—Native, white, or mixed—that grew up in thewake of colonization and trade. Bogoras made manyreferences to the Creole/mixed population in the AnadyrRiver valley, and he described its role in interculturaltransmission. In the case of coiled basketry, for ex-ample, Bogoras referred to the Chukchi willow rootweaving: "One or two of the Chukchee . . . make bet-ter baskets of willow-roots, but the style is whollycopied after the work of Russianized natives" (Bogoras1904-9:228). Jochelson avoided Creole people andmixed cultural traits in his Koryak work (Fig. 28); but inhis volume on the Yukagir (1926) he focused on Sibe-rian Native groups whose culture was deeply disruptedby Russian contact, Christianization, language loss, ma-terial culture change, and population decline throughdisease. Boas organized the Jesup Expedition publica-

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tions so that these "historically contingent" matterswere included in the regional reports; but he paid littleor no attention to them in his explanatory models oftrans-Beringian flows, even though such contacts wereevident to all.

It was only decades later that American anthro-pologists began to study Western-influenced Nativematerial cultures (cf. Craburn 1976). Therefore, it is notsurprising to discover that more recent paradigms, suchas transnationalism, have considerable relevance to thestudy of hybrid cultural forms such as the coiled bas-ketry of the Circumpolar North. According to Lavie andSwedenburg (1996:9), for example: "Hybrid productsare thus results of a long history of confrontations be-tween unequal cultures and forces.... The hybridiza-tions we encounter therefore are not just the productof entirely 'new,' epochal postmodern conditions [butalso resemble the old conditions]." This observationcould apply equally to the hybrid cultural forms suchas the coiled basketry of the North Pacific Rim duringthejesup Expedition era. Indeed, we believe that theso-called post-colonial model proposed by Lavie andSwedenburg (1996), Appadurai (1990,1991), and Inda(1996) is productive for the analysis of colonial con-texts under discussion here.

Appadurai (1990), for instance, argues that migrat-ing populations impact state and local politics, carry-ing with them new mechanical and informational tech-nologies, bringing along with them transnational in-vestments and new political ideologies; all of thesecould characterize Siberia of the mid-nineteenth cen-tury. In contrast, the evolutionary and diffusionary para-digms informing Jesup Expedition research were notonly inadequate for the colonial context but can bebetter seen as hypothetical models conceived for imag-ined but unobservable past.

To return to the title of our paper, we would arguethat diffusionism was not a satisfactory model for an-thropology of the colonial period, and that thetransnationalist model developed for the anthropol-ogy of the post-colonial period furnishes a more ad-

M. LEE AND N. H.H. CRABURN

equate lens through which to consider the hybriditythat defined it.

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to extend their gratitude to theorganizers of the Jesup Centennial Conference for theirinvitation to participate and for the stimulation the oc-casions and the ensemble of participants presented.They would particularly like to acknowledge the edi-torial guidance of Igor Krupnik.

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*~["he Jesup Expedition and jts /\naiogue5:

/\ (^.omparisoi

STANLEY A. FREED, RUTH S. FREED,AND LAILA WILLIAMSON

Several great expeditions of the 19th century have anaura of melodrama about them. They bring to mindhero-explorers operating in rugged country with littlelogistical support from a distant homeland, overcom-ing obstacles by ingenuity, courage, and persistence.The men who organized and led their own expedi-tions were resolute entrepreneurs with a strong inter-est, often tantamount to an obsession, in some scien-tific problem. The leaders of expeditions under gov-ernmental aegis were frequently military officers. Theywere experienced commanders, adept at leading smallcompanies of men in difficult, sometimes dangerouscircumstances. Leaders of both types of expeditionsoften carried out some of the expedition's scholarlywork; more commonly they acted as the principal sci-entists of the personally organized expeditions.

Some expeditions of the 19th century have be-come legendary scientific endeavors, the Jesup NorthPacific Expedition (JNPE) among them. What accountsfor the enduring fascination of the Jesup Expedition? Itwas a great adventure story, which is perhaps the chiefreason; but it had other less obvious features. They arebest seen when the Jesup Expedition is compared toother famous expeditions of the 1 9th century. We havechosen three well-known expeditions for comparativepurposes, the Lewis and Clark Expedition (1803-6), theU. S. Exploring Expedition (1838-42), and the CambridgeAnthropological Expedition to Torres Straits (1898-9).The first two were American, the third one British.

The Jesup North Pacific Expedition(1897-1902)

Franz Boas (1858-1 942), a young assistant curator inthe Department of Anthropology of the American Mu-seum of Natural History (AMNH), conceived and orga-nized the North Pacific Expedition in 1896-7, to studythe relationship between Native peoples of NortheastAsia and North America. Boas was keenly aware thatthe wealth of the American Museum's trustees andfriends could be used to support research and collect-ing, and he lost no time in Joining with Frederic WardPutnam (1839-1915), the head of the Department ofAnthropology, to seek the support of Morris K. Jesup,the AMNH President, for a research project of extraor-dinary scope and ambition. Putnam and Boas presentedJesup with a six-year project for research on both sidesof the Bering Strait.

Putnam's participation was vital, because Boas wasa new employee of the Museum, who had yet to provehimself to Jesup. Despite Putnam's role as catalyst andsome press reports that Putnam was in charge', theexpedition was cleady Boas' idea (Vakhtin 2001:74).Jesup liked big projects and important problems. Putnamand Boas played on this aspect of Jesup's personality,arguing that their project would settle the intriguingquestion of the origin of the first people to enter theNew World from Northern Asia. After an unsuccessfuleffort to raise money from his fellow philanthropists,Jesup vowed to fund the project personally.

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The estimated field expenses of the expedition havebeen variously reported as from $10,000 to $40,000per year. The New York Times {March 12, 1897:12) gavea figure of $60,000 or $10,000 per year. Kennedy(1 968:142), citing correspondence between Jesup andBoas, said, "[Jesup] agreed to underwrite the expensesof the expedition for six years, at an estimated cost of$40,000 a year." Boas unsuccessfully suggested a four-year extension of the expedition at a cost of $ 100,000,which indicates an annual cost of $25,000 (Kennedy1968:144). There were also later expenses of publica-tion (Cole 2001:39-41). The final cost of the expedi-tion will probably never be known with any precision.

The Jesup Expedition, announced in March 1897,generated considerable interest in the popular press.The origin of the American Indians is "the biggest ofthe unsolved anthropological and ethnical problems"and "alive with human and historic interest," stated TheNew York Times in an editorial of March 14, 1 897. Sci-ence, the bellwether American scientific journal, pub-lished a four-page unsigned article [presumably writ-ten by Boas—eds.] about the expedition a few monthsafter the departure of the first field party (Anonymous1897). The following summary of theJNPE activities isbased upon our earlier papers (Freed et al. 1988a,1988b, 1997), as well as upon other review publica-tions that appeared in recent years (Cole 1999, 2001;Vakhtin 2001).

The expedition's research on the Northwest Coastof North America was carried out by young profes-sionals, supplemented by a few local amateurs underBoas' direction and close supervision. Harlan I. Smith(1872-1940), who served at the American Museumuntil 1911 and eventually became Chief Archaeolo-gist of the National Museum of Canada, excavatedsites in British Columbia and Washington State. WhileBoas was not impressed with him intellectually, henonetheless considered him to be a reliable personwho could be successful with direction. Indeed he was;Smith contributed five volumes to the Jesup North Pa-cific Expedition series, and made important collections.

John R. Swanton (1873-1958), who joined the Bu-reau of American Ethnology Just after receiving hisdoctorate in 1 900, was seconded to the Jesup Expe-dition for about a year to study the Haida people ofthe Queen Charlotte Islands. The Bureau paid his salary($50 per month) and received all the lexical and gram-matical material that he collected, whereas the JesupExpedition paid his traveling and field expenses. Allethnological material, including texts, thus became theproperty of the American Museum (Boas to W.J. McCee,1 Oct. 1900, AMNH-DA; Jonaitis 1988:197-201).

Livingston Farrand (1 867-1 939), then professor ofpsychology at Columbia University, was a member ofBoas' first field party, which left New York in late May1897 for Spences Bridge, British Columbia. Boas,Farrand, and Smith, the third member of the team, metJames Teit, a local resident, who became their fieldguide and the fourth member of a small party (Wickwire,this volume). The group then left for Bella Coola. Farranddropped out when the team reached the Chilcotin;there he remained for a disappointing month collect-ing sparse ethnographic information and trying tomeasure heads. The next summer, 1898, he workedwith indifferent success among the Quileute andQuinault Indians of Washington State. He publishedonly three slim papers in the JNPE series but collectedsome outstanding artworks Oonaitis 1988:191).

George Hunt (1854-1933) and James Teit (1864-1922), local residents and amateur ethnographers whostraddled Euro-Canadian and Indian cultures, were twoof the most important and productive members ofBoas' team. Hunt was raised in Fort Rupert, British Co-lumbia as a Kwakwaka'wakw (KwakiutI), spoke theirlanguage fluently, was literate in English, and was asteady and reliable worker. The association of Huntand Boas began in 1 886, during Boas' first trip to theKwakwaka'wakw. Boas taught Hunt to write theKwakwaka'wakw language while Hunt was assistinghim with his work for the World's Columbian Exposi-tion in 1893. Hunt was truly a remarkable man. Boasrecognized his potential, helped him to develop it, and

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acknowledged his accomplishments by making himcollaborator and coauthor of numerous publications."|T|he Boas-Hunt relationship was one of the most pro-ductive and enduring ever to exist between an anthro-pologist and a member of another culture. [It] wasbased upon mutual interest, respect, and affection"(Codere 1966:xxviii; see also Berman 2001).

James A. Teit, a Scotsman who lived among theNIaka'pamux (Thompson) Indians, authored two sub-stantial monographs on the Thompson and anotheron the Lillooet Indians for the JNPE series; he also col-lected some exceptionally fine Salish artworks (Wick-wire, this volume). After the Expedition, Teit workedon behalf of Indian rights. "The British Columbian na-tives had immense respect and admiration for, andtrust in, this man, whom they asked to accompanythem to meetings with government officials. . . .Teitserved as translator, sometimes working simultaneouslyin four or five different languages" Gonaitis 1988:190).

The Siberian operations of the Jesup Expeditionbegan a year later than the North American researchand covered an area many times as large under condi-tions much more difficult than on the American side.Fieldwork on the Siberian side was an ordeal mainlybecause of the hostile environment.-^ Climate, terrain,illness, insects, and the vast distances that had to becovered by horse, reindeer sled, dog sled, boat, andraft, or on foot made research a dangerous adventure.It called forth a toughness that is rarely required in thepresent age of modern transport and communication.Moreover, the Russian government made trouble. TheCanadian and American governments took no interestin the activities of Boas and his team, and would helpif asked. The Russian government took a definite andhostile interest in the three principal JNPE investigatorsin Siberia, Berthold Laufer (1874-1934), WaldemarBogoras (1 865-1 936), and WaldemarJochelson (1855-1937). The former happened to be a foreigner and aJew; the latter two were former Russian political exiles,who spent several years in Siberia for their anti-govern-ment activities (Freed et al. 1997:12).

S. A, FREED, R. S. FREED, AND L. WILLIAMSON

Three teams carried out the Asian fieldwork. Laufer'steam surveyed along the Amur River and on SakhalinIsland in the southern section of the Siberian Pacificregion, whereas Bogoras' and Jochelson's parties cov-ered northeastern Siberia. The Amur River team of Lauferand amateur archaeologist Gerard Fowke was first intothe field. Laufer arrived on Sakhalin Island on July 10,1898, where he remained until March 21,1899, study-ing the Cilyak (Nivkh), Evenk (Tungus), and Ainu. Hecrossed to the mainland on March 25, and settled inKhabarovsk on the Amur River to study the Nanay(Gold). When navigation opened in late May, he de-scended the river, visiting Nanay and Gilyak villageson the way. Although he had a taste for fieldwork andfor the most part stoically endured its hardships, hisendurance was sorely taxed by some frightening ill-nesses and accidents, among them a two-and-a-halfmonth siege of influenza and pneumonia, and a plungethrough weak ice into frigid water that would havebeen fatal had not his guide saved him.

Laufer's published account in the Jesup North Pa-cific Expedition series was disappointing, especiallywhen compared to the classic ethnographies producedby Bogoras and Jochelson. His only JNPE volume was aslim, well-illustrated monograph on the art of the AmurRiver peoples (Laufer 1902). He was especially fasci-nated by the art of the Nanay and their neighbors, andhe collected many of their superb artworks for theAmerican Museum (Kendall 1988:104). After the JesupExpedition, Laufer Joined the Field Museum of NaturalHistory in 1908, where he spent the remainder of hisscholarly career. For many years he was easily the out-standing American Sinologist.

Gerard Fowke (1855-1933), Laufer's fleeting andoften grudging team partner (Cole 2001:36-7), was alargely self-taught itinerant adventurer who was drawnto archaeology by his love for outdoor life and tastefor exotic customs. He worked at various occupationsfor about 1 5 years, schoolteacher among them. Whenhe was 30, he abandoned teaching for research in ar-chaeology and geology. For his Siberian research of

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1 898, he recruited two local companions and set outin a large open boat to explore the Amur River fromthe village of Verkhne-Tambovsk to the town of Nikol-ayevsk, about 330 miles downstream at the mouth ofthe river. From there he traveled out into Tartar Strait,along the coast to the Sea of Okhotsk, and back toNikolayevsk. They found nothing of any interest; Fowkehimself acknowledged that his work was a "dismalfizzle." Boas considered him to have been a mistakeand permitted him only one season in Siberia. Un-daunted, Fowke continued his archaeological researchin the United States well into his seventies.

On the recommendation of Professor Vasily V. Rad-loff, the Secretary of the Russian Academy of Sciences,Boas entrusted fieidwork in northern Siberia to Walde-mar Jochelson and Waldemar Bogoras. Both were al-ready veterans of several years of Siberian field researchwhen they joined the Jesup Expedition team. Friendsand colleagues, they were Russian intellectuals andrevolutionaries who in their youth were exiled to Sibe-ria where they became ethnographers. The theme ofloss through exile and recovery through science givesthe lives of Jochelson and Bogoras a special piquancy.A young American, Norman C. Buxton, was chargedwith zoological collecting of behalf of the AMNH; hewas added to the group when Jochelson and Bogoraspassed through New York on their way to Siberia(Hoffmann, this volume). Jochelson also engaged Alex-ander Axelrod, a Russian emigre student from Zurich,as a general assistant, particularly for carrying on geo-graphical work (Boas 1903:101).

The team of Waldemar Bogoras and his wife Sofia(later to be Joined by Axelrod) arrived at Mariinsky Postat the mouth of the Anadyr River in July 1 900. Theyspent three months with the local Chukchi. At the endof October 1 900, Bogoras went on a long journey tonorthern Kamchatka for an arranged meeting with Joch-elson's team. Traveling mostly by dog sled, he was onthe move for the rest of his twelve and a half monthsin Northeast Asia. He generally remained no more thana few weeks in any location. Terrain and illness made

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the trip an ordeal. While her husband traveled, SofiaBogoras stayed in the small local town of Markovo onthe Anadyr River and at Mariinsky Post, making collec-tions for the American Museum.

Bogoras published five contributions for the JNPEseries, most prominently on the Chukchi. He and SofiaBogoras collected ethnographic data, linguistic notesand 150 texts, 4,500 ethnographic artifacts, skeletalmaterial, plaster casts of faces, archaeological speci-mens, 95 phonographic records, and somatologicalmeasurements of some 860 individuals. No modernanthropological couple has collected such a diversityof data. After the Expedition, Bogoras had a distin-guished career in Russia, engaging in scientific and lit-erary work. In 1932, he established the Museum of theHistory of Religion of the Russian Academy of Sci-ences and he was its first director until his death in1936.

While the Bogorases were occupied with theChukchi and the Siberian Yupik (Eskimo) in the North,Jochelson, his wife Dina Jochelson-Brodsky, and theirassociates, Axelrod and Buxton, made another JNPESiberian team that studied the Koryak and Tungus (Even)along the Sea of Okhotsk, and later, the Yukagir andSakha (Yakut) of the interior Northeast Siberia. On Au-gust 16, 1900, they arrived in Kushka, a small villageat the mouth of the Cizhiga River. Thejochelsons thenmade a difficult journey to the villages of the MaritimeKoryak in Penzhina Bay, where they spent the first halfof the winter of 1900 living most of the time in nativeunderground dwellings. Conditions were almost intol-erable. Lice were the greatest torment. "As long as weremained in these dwellings we could not escape theseinsects, which we dreaded more than any of the priva-tions of our journey" (Boas 1903:104).

The Jochelsons made comprehensive studies of theKoryak, Even, Yukagir, and Sakha people. They col-lected about 4,400 ethnographic specimens, 41 facecasts, measurements of 900 individuals, 1,200 photo-graphs, phonographic cylinders, skulls and archaeo-logical specimens, and a small zoological collection.

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Jochelson published three ethnographic monographsfor the American IVluseum; his wife Dina, who laterearned a degree in medicine, handled all the anthropo-metric work and most of the photography. She pub-lished several papers and a Ph.D. thesis on Nativewomen of Northeast Siberia.

After the JNPE, Jochelson led the Aleut-KamchatkaExpedition of the Imperial Russian Geographical Soci-ety in 1909-11. DinaJochelson-Brodsky, again,joinedhim as a field partner. From 1912 to 1922, he wasdivision curator of the Museum of Anthropology andEthnography of the Russian Academy of Sciences inSt. Petersburg/Petrograd; from 1922 until his death inNew York fifteen years later, Jochelson was associatedwith the American Museum and the Carnegie Institu-tion of Washington.

The Jesup Expedition confirmed the close relation-ship of the Native populations of northwestern NorthAmerica and northeastern Asia and strongly supportedthe view that the ancestors of the American Indianscame from Asia. Boas, Jochelson, and Bogoras tried togo beyond these currently accepted points but theiranalyses have not gained favor. From the data col-lected by the Jesup Expedition, Boas discerned a closecultural affiliation between eastern Siberia and the re-gion of Southern Alaska and British Columbia, a cul-tural "break" between the east Siberian tribes and theEskimo, and a "fundamental break" between the north-east Siberian tribes and the Tungus and Yakut to thewest. He wrote, the "Chukchee, Koryak, Kamchadal(Itelmen), and the Yukaghir must be classed with theAmerican race rather than with the Asiatic race." Inbrief, the JNPE postulated an assumed reverse migra-tion of American Indians to Siberia; Jochelson later gavethe name "Americanoids" to the people descendedfrom these hypothetical reverse migrants (Ousley 2000).The Americanoid theory never gained serious atten-tion and is considered today a historical curiosity.

Today, a century after the Jesup Expedition, its pub-lished ethnographies and museum collections retaintheir importance; but the contributions of the Expedi-

tion to solving the problem of the origin of the ancientNative Americans have been far superseded by laterresearch. Just before Boas and his party left for theNorthwest Coast in 1897, The New York Times wrotethat the origin of the American Indians is "the biggestof the unsolved anthropological and ethnical problems"and "alive with human and historic interest." That com-ment is as true today as it was 100 years ago. In thosedays, the issue was purely scientific, and anthropolo-gists were the only players. There were few theories tobe tested and the question lacked the political nu-ances that it has since acquired. Technology was simpleand before the Jesup Expedition data sets were sparse.Today, high technology (like radiocarbon dating andDNA studies) provides the key arguments, whereasancient and surprising skeletal finds, and newly dis-covered archaeological sites indicate that the ques-tion of the origins of the First Americans is much morecomplex than imagined a century ago. The next "JesupExpedition" will probably explore the problem prima-rily in modern laboratories rather than in the Siberianwilderness.

The Lewis and Clark Expedition (1803-6)

At the beginning of the nineteenth century, Presi-dent Thomas Jefferson initiated the Lewis and ClarkExpedition. Though perhaps the most famous of thegreat American expeditions, it owes its birth andlater fame more to political and historical circum-stances than to any enduring scientific legacy. Atthis point in history, negotiations between Franceand Spain over the Louisiana Territory were headingin a direction potentially dangerous to the interestsof the United States. Fortunately for the Americans,Napoleon was in need of money and he eventuallysold the Louisiana Territory to the United States onMay 2, 1803. Anticipating the inevitable Americanoccupation of the territory, President Jefferson hadinitiated preparations for an exploring mission tothe region before its purchase. The priority of theexpedition enhanced its fame. It was the first overland

S, A. FREED, R. S. FREED, AND L. WILLIAMSON

expedition to the Pacific coast and back (Ambrose1996:71-3, 101-2).

The Lewis and Clark Expedition has an extraordi-nary hold on the American imagination. Time maga-zine devoted its cover and a major, 43-page multi-authored article to the Expedition to mark AmericanIndependence Day, 2002, and to anticipate the cel-ebration of the Expedition's bicentennial, beginning inJanuary 2003, when the 11 states touched by the ex-plorers plan to commemorate and to re-create the 3-year journey. Trying to explain the American fascina-tion for the Expedition after 200 years. Time noted itspractical side, "When they launched their wooden boatsup the Missouri [River] and into the wilderness, Lewisand Clark were charting the future of America." Therehad to be a mystical element as well, and Time made astab, "[At that time] the young nation already had aconstitution, but it lacked an epic. It had a govern-ment but no real identity. Lewis and Clark helped in-vent one." (Kirn, 2002:38-9)

Captain Meriwether Lewis (1774-1809) and Lieu-tenant William Clark (1770-1838) led the expedition.Lewis, a confident, strong, and self-reliant member ofthe Virginia gentry, ran his family's large plantation atthe age of eighteen. He and Thomas Jefferson wereneighbors. When Jefferson became president hechose Lewis as his secretary and groomed him forleadership of a dangerous exploratory mission to thePacific. Lewis invited Clark, another Virginian, to sharecommand. Lewis and Clark had served together in thesame company and had become friends and mutualadmirers. At 33 years of age, Clark was the oldest manon the expedition.

Lewis and Clark selected their men with great careduring the summer of 1803. Many men applied, prob-ably for the adventure, but they also were well paidafter the expedition. Each man received a land grantand double pay (Ambrose 1996:414-5). The explor-ers, initially about 40 mostly young unmarried men,were organized as a military unit. Many of the menwere from the army and all but 10 were enlisted as

privates. All were outdoorsmen and good hunters; spe-cialties critical for a long and enduring journey—fromcarpentry to gun-smithing to iron-working to boat han-dling, and translating—were well represented.

President Jefferson instructed Lewis and Clark toexplore the Missouri River to its headwaters and fromthere, the rivers leading to the Pacific to find the mostdirect and practicable water communication acrossthe continent for purposes of commerce. Prospectsfor agriculture and settlement were almost as impor-tant a motive as commerce, and Jefferson wanted in-formation about plant and animal life, soil, mineral re-sources, and climate (Ambrose 1996:94-5). Knowl-edge of Indian tribes was important. As befits an ex-pedition of exploration, they were expected to makedetailed maps.

The party traveled the Missouri River in three boats.Lewis and party left Pittsburgh in late summer 1 803and, after wintering near St. Louis, the three boats setout for the upper Missouri in the spring of 1804,reaching the villages of the friendly Mandan Indiansin today's North Dakota where they spent the win-ter of 1 804 through early 1 805. The next spring, theparty continued up the Missouri, crossed the continen-tal divide on horseback, and descended the ColumbiaRiver in canoes. They reached its mouth and the Pacificshore in late fall 1805, and passed the winter there.The party arrived back in St. Louis in September 1806,to great excitement.

The journals of Lewis and Clark and shorter diariesby other members of the expedition are interestingnarratives of exploration, spiced with accounts ofmenacing encounters and perilous mishaps: Indianhostilities, accidents, difficult terrain and climate, ill-ness, and dangerous animals. Yet only one encounterwith Indians was fatal: Lewis and his men killed twoBlackfeet Indians. A member of the expedition died ofillness, several were dismissed, and one man was court-martialed and given 100 lashes (Moulton 1986, 2:7-8,60). The journals contain much important informationthat was new at the time. "Clark's great map of the

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west. . . would in itself have justified the expedition"(Moulton 1986, 2:5). However, complete publicationof the journals was long delayed, and Lewis andClark lost some credit for their discoveries (Ambrose1996:470).

After the Expedition, Lewis and Clark went on tosuccessful careers, not in science, as the members ofthe Jesup Expedition had done, for they were not sci-entists, but in politics. Jefferson named Lewis governorof the Louisiana Territory in 1807. It was a difficult role,and his life was complicated by personal financial prob-lems. He also suffered from mental and physical prob-lems—possibly hypochondria and depression, or evenfrom manic-depressive illness (Ambrose 1996:466-7).In less than two years, he committed suicide. Clarklater served as superintendent of Indian affairs in Loui-siana Territory and as governor of Missouri Territory.

The Lewis and Clark and Jesup Expeditions were sodifferent ventures as to be almost separate species.The purpose of Lewis and Clark was as much politicaland commercial as scientific. It brought knowledgeabout a vast new territory and helped open the Westto settlement. Politics and the expedition supportedone another. By contrast, the Jesup Expedition had nopolitical goal. A purely scientific venture, the JNPE dealtwith the most intriguing scholarly issues of the day,such as the problem of American Indian origins andthe relations of Native tribes living on both sides of theBering Strait. Lewis and Clark's mission featured no sci-entific problem or hypothesis, although the idea of aneasy water passage across the continent was still inthe air. Lewis and Clark laid that myth to rest.

The two expeditions were also organized very dif-ferently. The Lewis and Clark group stayed together. Ithad a command structure of a military unit with offic-ers and enlisted men. There were further distinctionsbased on crafts. The Jesup Expedition had almost noneof this structure. Expedition personnel were widely dis-persed in tiny units. Sometimes even couples wereseparated; the Bogorases worked separately for mostof their time in the field. Technical specialization de-

pended on incidental training and interests. Mrs.Jochelson, a medical student, took care of physicalanthropology and photography, particularly of thewomen; Mrs. Bogoras did most of the couple's ethno-graphic collecting. Basically, the Jesup Expedition fea-tured investigators working independently and re-sembled more closely the later style of independentfieldworker than the classic government-sponsoredresearch expedition represented by Lewis and Clark.

The U. S. Exploring Expedition (1838-42)

The U. S. Exploring Expedition dwarfs the other threeexpeditions in size, scope, drama, and later institutionaleffects. Yet it had drifted into relative obscurity for al-most a century until William Stanton's comprehensiveaccount (1975) and, especially, until the SmithsonianInstitution portrayed it ten years later in a major ex-hibit and book entitled Magnificent Voyagers {\/'\o\a andMargolis 1 985). Coming at a time when the Americanscientific community was tiny and its resources wereminuscule, the "Ex. Ex.," as it is often called, was mannafrom heaven. There was a rush to win places on theexpedition, for scientific reputations were there to bemade (Baatz 1986:1020; Stanton 1975:45).

As a large-scale project of science and explorationsponsored by the U. S. Government, the Ex. Ex. set aprecedent that continues to the present day and isbest compared to today's outer space program. It wasthe first such project of the U. S. Navy, and served as amodel for some fourteen subsequent American navalexploring expeditions before the Civil War. It includeda corps of civilian scientists, which was a novelty forthe United States. The nine selected expedition's"scientifics" were winnowed from a projected corpsof twenty-five. Several of them became giants in theirfields. Their scientific qualifications were equal to thoseof the members of the Jesup Expedition and far ex-ceeded the modest scientific training of Lewis and Clark."James Dwight Dana, the most gifted of the group ...became one of America's most distinguished scien-tific leaders" (Viola 1985:10).

S. A. FREED, R. S. FREED, AND L. WILLIAMSON

The civilian scientists worked chiefly in geology,botany, zoology, and philology. Most of the physicalsciences—geography, hydrography, astronomy, studyof terrestrial magnetism, meteorology, and cartogra-phy—were assigned exclusively to naval officers. Thecharter of the Ex. Ex. emphasized the promotion ofcommerce and navigation, and so the work of the"scientific gentlemen" was seen as less essential to thesuccess of the expedition than the task of explorationand mapping. The scientific character of the expedi-tion was not lessened by the secondary role playedby its civilian scientists; in retrospect, their researchand collecting turned out to be as scientifically impor-tant as the work of the naval officers.

Lieutenant Charles Wilkes commanded the expedi-tion. Born in New York City, he attended various board-ing schools, and his well-to-do father had him tutoredprivately. He was drawn to the sea at the age of 1 5.After several voyages as a sailor, he received an ap-pointment at the age of 19 as midshipman in the U. S.Navy (Leonhart 1985:189-91). Later he studied sur-veying, advanced mathematics, triangulation, geomag-netism, and hydrography. After several officers hadbeen given command of the expedition and then wererelieved of duty, Wilkes was offered the post and hisappointment approved when he was 40. There wereforty other naval lieutenants at the time, and thirty-eight had more sea service (Stanton 1 975:61). How-ever, Wilkes "respected science" and had scientificqualifications.

Wilkes was an autocrat, much more so than Lewis.He represented the "old navy" where flogging was freelyused to maintain discipline. Described as contentious,opinionated, brooding, aloof, arrogant, conceited, rude,a strict disciplinarian, and always fearful of cabals andmutiny, he cultivated the image of a martinet, becauseit invoked authority and obedience (Stanton 1975:1 39).Although Wilkes was not loved, he certainly was re-spected. James Dwight Dana valued Wilkes highly: "Imuch doubt if, with any other commander ... weshould have fared better or lived together more har-

moniously, and I am confident that the Navy does notcontain a more daring or driving officer" (Viola 1985:23).

Six ships set sail from Hampton Roads, Virginia, inAugust 1 838. During the fouryears of intensive surveyof the Pacific Ocean region, the fleet crossed the Pa-cific three times extending explorations from Tierra delFuego to Polynesia to Antarctica to New Zealand, Fiji,and to the North Pacific Coast of North America. Twoof the smaller ships were lost in rough seas, one withits 1 5-man crew. The Expedition returned to the UnitedStates by way of the Cape of Good Hope. The sailorswere young "iron men" in the era of wooden ships;hard work was required and heroics were expected.The Ex. Ex. was the last great circumnavigation of theglobe under sail (Kassel 1985:257).

The scientific results of the Ex. Ex. were publishedin 19 volumes of reports and atlases (originally, 28were planned). There were also large collections ofplants, animals, ethnographic specimens, gems, fos-sils, and corals. The collections eventually came to thefledgling Smithsonian Institution and helped determineits development toward a museum institution that be-came the National Museum of the United States, andaway from the national research institute that was areal alternative in the 1840s and 1850s Gackson1985:450; Viola 1985:9). The publications were prob-ably the expedition's most remarkable achievement.The reports were the grandest scientific production tocome out of the U. S. until that time and they had anacknowledged international impact. Much of the sur-vey was still incorporated in nautical charts a centurylater Cackson 1985:455). That the work of the Ex. Ex.was mostly published was due to the tireless effortsof Wilkes, who bullied the scientists into completingtheir reports and battled the Government to ensurepublication. Without publication and "Without Wilkes'incredible energy and Byzantine mind, the Expedition'sachievements might have been no more lasting thanthe wake of its ships upon the waters of the world"(Stanton 1975:363).

The Ex. Ex. resembled Lewis and Clark's mission in

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its funding and military organization, and the Jesup Ex-pedition in its emphasis on science. All three expedi-tions operated in difficult and dangerous regions, andthe participants were tough men and women. All threehad extraordinary leaders, bold, determined men, withenormous energy. However, the exploration of un-charted regions was by far the main purpose of thetwo military-style expeditions, with additional strongpolitical and commercial motives. The JNPE, lackingboth, was an entirely scientific venture.

The Cambridge Anthropological Expedi-tion to Torres Straits, 1898-9

The Torres Straits Expedition, organized by Alfred C.Haddon (1855-1940), was, like the Jesup Expedition,a pure scientific enterprise. Haddon and his team left alasting mark on British anthropology just as Boas fixedhis stamp on American anthropology (Kuklick 1998:1 58-9; Rouse 1998:50, 73-6). However, Torres Straitslacked the grimness of theJNPE's grueling fieldwork.Melanesia was no bed of roses—there was oneuncomfortable and dangerous voyage of about a weekon a crowded small ketch—but it was nothing com-pared to East Siberia. Writing to Boas from Khabarovskon the Amur River, Laufer observed, "Nothing is freehere except death, which you can have in this coun-try at special bargain rates." By contrast, W. H. R.Rivers decided to join the Torres Straits Expeditionbecause he was feeling run down and "much in needof a holiday," and Charles Myers spoke of his Borneosojourn as "a delightful way to spend a holiday"(Stocking 1995: 109, 111). Torres Straits was seri-ous business, but it also had the unmistakable air ofcollege boys on a lark.

Haddon came from a family initially in comfortablecircumstances: his father owned a printing firm andwanted his son to enter the business (Quiggin 1942:4);but the son's interests, encouraged by his mother, werein science. Clearly not cut out for the business world,he was sent to Cambridge to study physiology andzoology. In 1880, he obtained the chair in zoology at

S. A. FREED, R. S. FREED, AND L. WILLIAMSON

the Royal College of Science in Dublin. Stocking (1 995:99) describes him as gentle and emphatic by nature.He had wide interests, inexhaustible energy, and wasdeeply religious, impetuous, and devoted to naturalscience, especially zoology (Quiggin 1942: 10,64).

Haddon and Boas were alike in some ways. Theyboth had backgrounds in the natural sciences, Haddonin zoology and Boas in physics. They both had experi-ence in their areas of interest before organizing theirexpeditions. Both saw their earlier fieldwork partially interms of professional advancement. Boas hoped thathis multi-year field research in British Columbia on be-half of the British Association for the Advancement ofScience (BAAS) would help establish him as anAmericanist, thus opening the door to permanent em-ployment and a successful career in the United States.Haddon wanted to escape the dead end of a provin-cial professorship. He was "perishing for want of re-search" and opined that "the Department here is playedout" (Quiggin 1942:77). In 1888 Haddon went to TorresStraits to study coral reefs and saw opportunities forethnographic work in the region. Back in England, heturned to anthropology and obtained a post as Lec-turer in Physical Anthropology at Cambridge in 1 895.In 1897 he decided to return to Torres Straits to gathermore information for an ethnography that CambridgeUniversity Press had agreed to publish.

Haddon selected six investigators, his ideal num-ber, by specialization. His concept of anthropologyincluded psychology, for "a successful investigator musthave a true insight into the minds of the investigatedand understand their reactions and ways of thought"(Quiggin 1942:95). He began with two experimentalpsychologists, Charles S. Myers and William McDougall,both students of W. H. R. Rivers. When Rivers asked tobe included, three of the six investigators on theexpedition's team were experimental psychologistswho studied such faculties as vision, hearing, smell,touch, and reaction time (Rivers 1901:1-2). AlthoughHaddon felt that the psychological side was ratheroverweighed, he was pleased to have Rivers. More-

9 7

over, Myers was an accomplished musician, thus fillingone of Haddon's limitations. The other limitation thatHaddon felt keenly was linguistics, and he was fortu-nate to recruit Sidney H. Ray, the only available Englishspecialist with an excellent knowledge of Melanesianlanguages. Anthony Wilkins, an undergraduate, joinedthe group as anthropological trainee and photogra-pher. Charles G. Seligman, a medical pathologist withleanings toward anthropology, was the final addition.Haddon completely neglected archaeology and paidrelatively little attention to physical anthropology.

The anthropological work of the Jesup Expedition—compared to the Torres Straits expedition—featuredless individual specialization by discipline. Boas selectedhis two key Siberian investigators Gochelson andBogoras) because of their previous work with the tribeshe wanted studied. On the other hand, he recognizedarchaeology as a special field, and he put two archae-ologists on his expedition team (Smith and Fowke), inaddition to a mammal specialist (Buxton) who collectedabout 500 mammal specimens. The rest of the per-sonnel, especially on the Siberian side, were expectedto take care of everything: ethnography, linguistics,and physical anthropology and a little archaeologicaland zoological collecting as well. It all worked outvery well, mainly because of the competence of thefieldworkers.

Unlike Boas, Haddon pieced together his fundingfrom several sources: Cambridge University, the gov-ernments of Britain and Queensland, and several scien-tific societies. Nonetheless, he did not have enoughmoney, and the six anthropologists had to pay theirown way. Unexpectedly, Charles Hose, a district offi-cial, on learning of the expedition, persuaded the Ra-jah of Sarawak to invite the group to Sarawak all ex-penses paid, which resulted in several additional monthsof fieldwork on Borneo (Stocking 1995:109).

The group arrived at Thursday Island on April 22,1898. From there, the seven anthropologists split intotwo groups and sailed east. Rivers, Myers, andMcDougall spent four months on Mer (Murray) Island,

"carrying out the first extended series of psychologi-cal and physiological tests ever performed on nativepopulations." (Stocking 1995:109). The other mentoured the southeastern coast of New Guinea. Later,part of the group went to Sarawak, and the otherstoured along the western shore and among the is-lands of the Gulf of Papua. The last members of theexpedition left for England in April 1899.

The veterans of the Torres Straits Expedition, likethose of the Jesup Expedition, had distinguished andinfluential later careers. Haddon did more than any otherman to establish anthropology at Cambridge. He hada strong sense of fieldwork and placed it at the heartof what it means to be an ethnographer. He publishedenormously until the year of his death. Seligman andRivers, veterans of the Torres Expedition and two ofthe great anthropologists of the day, are credited withproviding the ethnographic core of the "CambridgeSchool" of anthropology (Stocking 1 995:115. 117;Kuklick 1998:158-9). Myers and McDougall becameinfluential in psychology.

Conclusion

Why are these four expeditions famous? First, the tim-ing was favorable. They all were the earliest of theirkind, and their scientific work was important at thetime. Some of it is still quite valuable today, especiallythe collections, the ethnographies of the Jesup and theTorres Straits expeditions, and River's development ofthe "genealogical method," an indispensable tool inethnography.^ Second, publication of the scientific re-sults of all the expeditions was massed in a set ofvolumes rather than dispersed in scattered individualpublications, which considerably increased the scien-tific impact of the work. Boas was certainly aware ofthis effect. His agreement with his researchers statedthat all publications would appear in the museum'sseries, with certain exceptions but only with museumapproval. Coordinated publication is not easilyachieved. The leaders of the expeditions had to cajoleauthors to submit manuscripts and to supervise the

98

100 YEARS/ COMPARISON OF EXPEDITIONS

process of publication long after the fieldwork wasdone. On the contrary, neither Lewis nor Clark took thepains to publish the journals of their expedition. Othereditors prepared them for publication, the first ap-pearing in 1814.

Thirdly, the investigators—Boas,Jochelson, Bogoras,Laufer, Haddon, Rivers, Seligman, and Dana—wereamong the greatest scientists of the day. Boas' ideasinfluenced anthropology in the United States for de-cades; Haddon built anthropology at Cambridge. Therewere effects on museums as well as on universities. Atthe American Museum, the Jesup Expedition was tosome extent the model for the next major effort, thestudy of the Plains Indians, although Clark Wissler didmuch more theoretically with the Plains project thanBoas did with the Jesup Expedition material (Freed andFreed 1983:808-9). The Ex. Ex. was important in thehistory of the Smithsonian; Baatz (1986:1020) alsocredits it with catalyzing "the creation of a nationalscientific association, which appeared a few years laterwith the genesis of the AAAS [American Associationfor the Advancement of Science] in 1848." Quiggin(1942:142-3) credits Haddon during his brief curator-ship at the Cambridge Museum of Archaeology andEthnology with arranging related objects to tell a storyand thus to make the collections essential factors inethnographical and geographical work.

A century after two strictly scientific expeditions,Jesup North Pacific and Torres Straits, the people of theregions that were studied recognize the importanceof the work done by visiting ethnographers. Althoughwith some reservations, they are thankful that a recordof their lives was made before their cultures had irrevo-cably changed. Kwakwaka'wakw who came to NewYork for the opening of the Chiefly Feasts, the EnduringKwal<iiitl Potlatch exhibit at the American Museum in1991, commented, "Thank God for Hunt and Boas.Without them we would have no culture." The currentchief of Thursday Island, Ephraim Bani, on a trip toEuropean museums in 1 997, said that when Haddonvisited Thursday Island he had found its culture disin-

tegrating and was "on a rescue mission." Chief Baninow found "his culture preserved" in the CambridgeMuseum, where Haddon had brought his Torres Straitcollections (Merrison and Calvert 1997). In an editorialcomment about Drawing Shadows to Stone, a photo-graphic exhibition based on the work of the Jesup Ex-pedition on the Northwest Coast and in Siberia, TheNew York Times wrote, "[l]t is impossible to look atthese photographs ... without sensing that their sub-jects were collaborating with the anthropologistsamong them to devise a new, and still evolving, formof survival" {The New Yorl< Times, 29 Jan. 1998:A22).Such collaboration is the key to ethnography that haslasting value.

The chief reason for the fame of the expeditionsfor the general public is that all four ventures werespellbinding adventure stories. The Ex. Ex., the JesupExpedition in Siberia, and Lewis and Clark, especially inthe Bitterroot Mountains, were dangerous, and full ofhairbreadth escapes. Torres Straits was less hazard-ous, but in those days just being in Melanesia wasadventure enough for Europeans. The Ex. Ex. took prideof place with its generous measure of treachery, flog-gings, hostage taking, shipwreck, and pitched battles.Some 100 lives were lost. All of this would be enoughto ensure the enduring fascination of the expeditions.

But there is something else. The expeditions fore-shadow major historical trends. Lewis and Clark andthe Ex. Ex. are full of optimism and self-confidence, theproduct of a new strong country fulfilling its "manifestdestiny" from ocean to ocean and beyond its borders.Torres Straits was different, as Haddon came face toface with the results of western colonialism. He wasnot at all sure that its real and alleged benefits wereworth the damage it caused to Native peoples.

The Jesup Expedition has a curious foreboding qual-ity. Bogoras and Jochelson were former undergroundpolitical conspirators who had spent time in prisonand lived for years in exile, both abroad and in Siberia.The Russian government maintained a secret surveil-lance over their field activities during the JNPE mission.

S. A. FREED, R. S. FREED, AND L. WILLIAMSON

99

Laufer had considerable trouble obtaining Russian per-mission even to get to Siberia, because he was Jew-ish—as were the two other key Siberian investigators(Freed et al. 1988a: 12-3). Their lives seemed to heraldthe murderous political, ethnic, and ideological con-flicts that convulsed Europe during the twentieth cen-tury. Participants in all four expeditions faced uncom-fortable, sometimes dangerous, conditions in the field;but only the JNPE groups working in Siberia had tocontend with governmental suspicion if not hostility.In view of this circumstance, Boas wrote tojesup, "thefull success of their investigation deserves the highestpraise."

Acknowledg merits

Our thanks are due to Laurel Kendall for inviting us tocontribute an essay to this volume. We thank AliciaCarmona for research assistance.

Notes

1. The New York Times reported, "The expeditionwill be backed by Mr. Jesup from his private resources.Prof. F. W. Putnam...will conduct the expedition andwith him will be the anthropologist Dr. Boas" (12 March1897:12). In fact, Putnam never went into the field withthe expedition, and Boas directed and supervised thewhole enterprise.

2. As Bogoras wrote to Lev Shternberg, a fellowpolitical exile, "Kolymsk [in Siberia] is a different planet,even less connected with Earth than the Moon, com-pletely alien to Earth, a block of ice cast out into spaceand suspended there above the emptiness, where ev-ery accidental spark of life freezes down and suffo-cates" (20 June 1894, quoted in Vakhtin 2001:79).

3. Another methodological innovation that camefrom the Torres Straits Expedition was a system ofrecording string figures. Haddon had a longstandinginterest in string figures, and, in 1898, he and Riversinvented a method for recording them (Quiggin1942:128-129; Rivers and Haddon 1902). Althoughlater simplified terminologies have been developed,the precise anatomical nomenclature of Rivers andHaddon is still preferred 100 years later (Averkieva andSherman, 1992:xxii, xxviii, 5).

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1996 Undaunted Courage. Meriwether Lewis, ThomasJefferson, and the Opening of the American West. NewYork: Simon & Schuster.

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North Pacific Ocean. Science, n.s. 5(1 1 6):455-57.Averkieva, Julia P., and Mark. A. Sherman

1992 KwakiutI String Figures. Anthropological Pa-pers of the American Museum of Natural History?].Seattle: University of Washington Press; New York:American Museum of Natural History.

Baatz, Simon

1986 Magnificient Voyagers. Science 232A 020.Berman, Judith

2001 Unpublished Materials of Franz Boas and GeorgeHunt: A Record of 45 Years of Collaboration. In Gate-ways. Exploring the Legacy of the Jesup North PacificExpedition. Igor Krupnik and William W. Fitzhugh, eds.Pp. 181 -21 3. Contributions to Circumpolar Anthropol-ogy 1. Washington, DC: Arctic Studies Center.

Boas, Franz

1903 The Jesup North Pacific Expedition. American

Museum Journal 3{Sy.72-] 19.Codere, Helen, ed.

1966 Franz Boas, KwakiutI Ethnography. Chicago: Uni-versity of Chicago Press.Cole, Douglas

1999 Franz Boas.The Early Years, 1858-1906.Vancouver/Toronto: Douglas and Mclntyre; Seattleand London: University of Washington Press.

2001 The Greatest Thing Undertaken by Any Museum?Franz Boas, Morris Jesup, and the North Pacific Expe-dition. In Gateways. Exploring the Legacy of the JesupNorth Pacific Expedition. Igor Krupnik and WilliamW. Fitzhugh, eds. Pp.29-70. Contributions to Circum-polar Anthropology 1. Washington, DC: Arctic Stud-ies Center.

Freed, Stanley A., and Ruth S. Freed

1983 Clark Wissler and the Development of Anthro-pology in the United States. American Anthropologist85(4):800-25.

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Williamson

1988a Capitalist Philanthropy and Russian Revolu-tionaries: The Jesup North Pacific Expedition (1897-1902). American Anthropologist 90(\):7-2A.

1988b The American Museum's Jesup North Pacific Ex-pedition. In Crossroads of Continents: Cultures of Si-beria and Alaska. William W. Fitzhugh and AronCrowell, eds. Pp. 97-103. Washington, DC: Smith-sonian Institution Press.

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1997 Tough Fieldworkers: History and Personalitiesof the Jesup Expedition. In Drawing Shadows to Stone:The Photography of the Jesup North Pacific Expedition,]897-]902. Laurel Kendall, Barbara Mathe, and Tho-mas R. Miller, eds. Pp. 9-1 7. New York: AmericanMuseum of Natural History; Seattle: University ofWashington Press.

Jackson, C. Ian

1985 Exploration as Science: Charles Wilkes and theU. S. Exploring Expedition, 1938-42. American Scien-tist 73:450-61.

Jonaitis, Aldona

1988 From The Land of the Totem Poles. The NorthwestCoast Indian Art Collection at the American Museum ofNatural History. New York: American Museum ofNatural History; Seattle: University of WashingtonPress.

Kassel, Bernard M.

1985 Iron Men and Wooden Ships: A Chronology,1838-1 842. In Magnificent Voyagers: The U. S. Ex-ploring Expedition, 1838-1842. Herman J. Viola andCarolyn Margolis, eds. Pp. 257-65. Washington, DC:Smithsonian Institution Press.

Kendall, Laurel

1988 Young Laufer on the Amur. In Crossroads of Con-tinents: Cultures of Siberia and Alaska. William W.Fitzhugh and Aron Crowell, eds. P.I 04. Washington,DC: Smithsonian Institution Press.

Kennedy, John Michael

1968 Philanthropy and Science in New York City: theAmerican Museum of Natural History, 1868-1968.Ann Arbor, Michigan: University Microfilms.

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2002 Lewis and Clark: The Journey That Changed

America Forever. Time 162(2), July 8. Pp. 38-41.Kukiick, Henrika

1998 Fieldworkers and Psychologists. In Cambridgeand the Torres Strait: Centenary Essays on the 1898Anthropological Expedition. Anita Herle and SandraRouse, eds. Pp. 1 58-80. Cambridge: Cambridge Uni-versity Press.

Laufer, Berthold

1902 The Decorative Art of the Amur Tribes. The JesupNorth Pacific Expedition, vol. 4, pt.1. Memoirs of theAmerican Museum of Natural History, 6. Leiden: E.J.Brill; New York: C.E. Stechert.

Leonhart, Joye

1985 Charles Wilkes: a Biography. In Magnificent Voy-agers: The U. S. Exploring Expedition, 1838-1842.Herman J. Viola and Carolyn Margolis, eds. Pp. 1 89-203. Washington, DC: Smithsonian InstitutionPress.

Merrison, L., and F. Calvert

1997 Cracks in the Mask [a film]. A Talking Pictures

Frances Calvert Production.Mouiton, Gary, ed.

1986 The Journals of the Lewis and Clark Expedition,August 30, 1803-August 24, 1804. 8 vols. Lincoln:University of Nebraska Press.

Ousley, Stephen D.

2000 Boas, Brinton, and the Jesup North Pacific Expe-dition: The Return of the Americanoids. European Re-view of Native American Studies 14(2): 1 1 -8.

Quiggin, Alison H.

1 942 Haddon, the Head Hunter, A Short Sketch of theLife of A. C. Haddon. Cambridge: Cambridge Univer-sity Press.

Rivers, William H. R.

1901 Introduaion. In Reports of the Cambridge Anthropo-logical Expedition to Torres Straits, vol. 2, pt. 1. AlfredC. Haddon, ed. Pp.1-7. Cambridge: Cambridge Uni-versity Press.

Rivers, William H. R., and Alfred C. Haddon

1 902 A Method of Recording String Figures and Tricks.Mflrt 2:146-53.

Rouse, Sandra

1 998 Expedition and Institution: A. C. Haddon and An-thropology at Cambridge. In Cambridge and the TorresStrait: Centenary Essays on the 1898 AnthropologicalExpedition. Anita Herle and Sandra Rouse, eds. Pp.50-76. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Stanton, William

1 975 The Great United States Exploring Expedition of

1838-1842. Berkeley: University California Press.Stocking, George W., Jr.

1995 After Tylor: British Social Anthropology, 1888-

1951. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.Vakhtin, Nikolai B.

2001 Franz Boas and the Shaping of the Jesup ExpeditionSiberian Research, 1 895-1 900. In Gateways. Explor-ing the Legacy of the Jesup North Pacific Expedition.Igor Krupnik and William W. Fitzhugh, eds. Pp.71-89.Contributions to Circumpolar Anthropology 1. Wash-ington, DC: Arctic Studies Center.

Viola, Herman J.

1985 The Story of the U. S. Exploring Expedition. InMagnificent Voyagers: The U. S. Exploring Expedition,1838-1842. Herman J. Viola and Carolyn Margolis,eds. Pp. 10-23. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institu-tion Press.

Viola, Herman J., and Carolyn Margolis, eds.

1985 Magnificent Voyagers: The U. S. Exploring Expedi-tion, 1838-1842. Washington, DC: Smithsonian In-stitution Press.

S. A. FREED, R. S. FREED, AND L. WILLIAMSON

29/ Dina Jochelson-Brodsky steps out of the expedition's winter headquarters at the village ofKamenskoye, 1901.Photographer, Waldemar Jochelson (AMNH 41 71-6729)

ANTHROPOLOGIES AND HISTORIES:JESUP TEAM MEMBERS THEN AND NOW

f^ranz £)oa5 and the fvlusic

of the j\jorthwest (^oast jndians

IRA JACKNIS

Franz Boas' research strategy for the Jesup Expeditionwas broad, relying on a wide range of documentation.In addition to casts and measurements of body parts,ethnographic and archaeological artifacts, observers'field notes, linguistic texts in Native languages, andphotographs, Boas and his team collected music inthe form of notation and sound recordings. A pioneerin so many areas of anthropology. Boas was also aleader in the field of ethnomusicology, generally, andthe study of Northwest Coast Indian music, specifi-cally. This essay summarizes and contextualizes Boas'musicological contribution by reviewing his researchand writing on the topic during the two decadessurrounding the Jesup Expedition, 1886-1906. It alsooffers a more detailed examination of his most ex-tended Jesup research: his recording of ThompsonIndian songs in 1 897.'

As part of his broad education in mid-nineteenthcentury Germany, Franz Boas (] 858-1 942) studiedEuropean art and music, and learned to play thepiano (Liss 1996:160). According to his biographer,"Music ... formed an important part of his life. He hadbegun to learn the piano early, and his enjoyment ofHaydn, Mozart, Beethoven, and Bach increased as hegrew older" (Cole 1999:32). As Cole makes clear,though, this musical education came informally; thatis, Boas acquired it as an avocation. Partly because ofthe specialization demanded by the German educa-tional system, he never studied music in his secondaryor university classes. His older sister Toni was a great

influence, an accomplished pianist with whom heplayed four-hand piano arrangements (Liss 1996:162).As a student in Bonn, he sang in a choir and formed atrio with two of his friends. Throughout his life Boasmade an effort to live with a piano, frequently attendedclassical concerts, and hung pictures of Mozart andBeethoven in honored places in his home (Cole 1999:46-7,139). Classical music was often a presence forhim on his field trips far from home: He "yearned forBeethoven" during his first fieldwork, among theBaffinland Eskimo in 1883-84 (Liss 1995:122), and onhis British Columbia field trips played the piano andorgan at the request of local residents (Rohner1969:67ff, 141-2). While he clearly derived pleasurefrom this music, the aim of his piano-playing was notso much to be a practiced performer but more to un-derstand the music and the performances of others: "Iwant to learn only in order to understand and, of course,to listen. I want to learn the playing of music only in sofar as it allows me to appreciate" (F. Boas to Toni Boas,6 October 1 876, in Cole 1 999:32; cf. Liss 1996:162).This remark makes clear his scholarly or analytic ap-proach to music, and it was these substantial musicalabilities that formed the foundation for his subsequentanthropological research on the subject.

From his first field trip to his last, Boas documentedNative music. Although his fieldwork among the Baffin-land Eskimo (Inuit) of 1 883^ was conducted primarilyto determine Native perceptions of the environment,he transcribed folk tales and songs, published in a

1 05

series of later articles (Boas 1887a, 1889a, 1894a,1897b) and in his monograph. The Central Eskimo (Boas1888c). His first exposure to Northwest Coast Indianmusic came in January 1885, when he worked with atroupe of Bella Coola visiting Berlin. Struck by their"unique music," he transcribed four of their songs, whichhe sent to Carl Stumpf (Cole 1 982:11 9, 11 7). Stumpf,a German psychologist who was one of the foundersof comparative musicology, had studied the songs ofthe Bella Coola party a few months earlier, whenthey visited Halle (Stumpf 1886). In the fall of 1886,Boas made his first visit to the Northwest Coast. Herehe studied Chinook songs in Victoria and Vancouver,and KwakiutI song and dance in the villages of north-ern Vancouver Island.

Music thus lay at the very inception of Boas' North-west Coast research, and he continued to study thesubject in the years leading up to the Jesup Expedi-tion. During the Chicago World's Fair in 1 893, he againdocumented Native music in a displaced setting—thistime using the phonograph to record songs of thevisiting group of KwakiutI (Jacknis 1991 a: Fig. 30). Onhis next field trip, he was able to greatly extend hisstudy of the tribe's music in its ceremonial setting, thistime over several weeks in the fall of 1 894 at FortRupert (Fig. 31). The first season of the Jesup Expedi-tion marked an important advancement in Boas' musi-cological research; for the first time he was able to usethe phonograph in the field. In June 1 897 he recordedThompson Indian music with the assistance of JamesTeit in Spences Bridge, B.C. These sessions also provedto be his most extensive musicological research forthe expedition. He was in the field only once moreduring the Jesup Expedition years; on that second tripof 1900 he focused on KwakiutI material culture andlanguage, rather than on anything specifically musical.

Although Boas traveled periodically to the North-west Coast after 1900, he did little musicological field-work until his last trip, in 1930-1, when he again workedwith the KwakiutI of Fort Rupert and Alert Bay. This, atthe age of 72, was actually his most intensive study of

Native music. He recorded 1 56 cylinders and exposedabout an hour's worth of 16-mm film of dance, crafts,and gesture. On this trip he attempted to gather mate-rial that would allow him to delineate tribal, genre, andindividual styles, and also to clarify the rhythmic rela-tions of texts and dance movements. Even then he didnot stop, recording KwakiutI Daniel Cranmer on ac-etate-coated aluminum disks when Cranmer visitedBoas in New York in 1941, the year before Boas' death.

Boas' Research and Writing on Music

Franz Boas made important contributions to a numberof diverse areas of ethnomusicological research, amongthem recording and transcription; formal analysis (scales,melody, and rhythm); song genres; song texts and therelations of words and music; performance practice;the social and cultural context of music; organology(the study of musical instruments); areal relations andhistory; and acculturation; in addition to his supportfor the institutional structures of scholarship.

Perhaps his most important contributions to thefield of ethnomusicology were on the nature of tran-scription in notation and sound recording (Ellingson1992:118-25). Boas published over a hundred of hisown transcriptions (Fig. 32). At the beginning, he tran-scribed the music by having the singer repeat the notesuntil he had written it down in a Western notationstyle. However, his work with Stumpf and the BellaCoola had made him well aware of the limitations ofWestern notation for tribal music. In one article, forexample, he adopted Stumpf s diacritic of a zero markplaced above a note, to indicate that "the tone is sunga little lower" (Boas 1888a:50; Ellingson 1992:120).

Boas was among the earliest ethnologists to makemechanical sound recordings. The first American an-thropologist to use Edison's wax cylinder phonographin the field was Jesse W. Fewkes, who recordedPassamaquoddy Indian music in Maine in 1890.^ Hefollowed this test with recordings of the Zuni in 1890and the Hopi in 1891. Funded by Boston philanthro-pist Mary Hemenway, this collection was acquired by

1 06

PARTICIPANTS/ BOAS AND MUSIC

Harvard's Peabody Museum in 1894. During the Chi-cago World's Fair in 1893, Boas worked with musi-cologist John C. Fillmore to record KwakiutI songs on116 wax cylinders. Also at the Chicago Fair, BenjaminIves Oilman recorded Javanese, Samoan, Turkish, as wellas KwakiutI music (again with Hemenway sponsorship;this collection was also acquired by Harvard). The mostimportant institution for the recording of American In-dian music during its first decade was the Smithsonian'sBureau of American Ethnology (BAE). Alice C. Fletcher,a Bureau research associate, had been studying NativeAmerican music since the early 1880s, and during the1890s she recorded the Omaha and many other Plainsgroups. Other Bureau recordists were Washington Matt-hews, among the Navajo, and James A. Mooney amongthe Caddo, Comanche, Arapaho, Kiowa, and Paiute.

Though starting slightly laterthan the Smithsonian,the American Museum of Natural History under Boaswas a leader, especially in quantity and regional range,and it was the first American anthropology museumto collect sound recordings. The history of early Ameri-can Indian recording remains to be written, but itappears that the American Museum was much moresystematic than the BAE in sponsoring recording.Perhaps because of Boas' own interest in the subject,the cylinders were carefully cataloged as soon as theyentered the museum. At the Smithsonian, on the otherhand, their creation and preservation were left to theinterest of individual researchers. Moreover, the Ameri-can Museum's collection predated the largest Euro-pean sound archive, the Berlin Phonogramm-Archiv,which began informally in 1900 and officially in 1 905(Reinhard 1971; Simon 2000, cf. Gillis 1984:324). Inaddition to the 228 cylinders made by the Jesup Expe-dition, other early American Museum recordings weremade among the Blackfoot and other Plains groups byGeorge Bird Grinnell in 1897 and among the Tarahumaraand Huichol of northern Mexico by Carl Lumholtz thefollowing year. The American Museum collection, inturn, became the model for others at the University ofCalifornia and Indiana University.^

Although we have no explicit statements from Boason the ethnographic utility of the phonograph, he musthave advocated it for his Jesup Expedition colleagues,as several of the parties used the machine. The firstaccessioned collection of phonograph recordings inthe American Museum is comprised of 1 39 cylindersfrom the Koryak, Yukagir, Yakut (Sakha), Tungus (Even),Chukchi, Eskimo (Siberian Yupik), and local Russiansmade by Waldemar Jochelson and Waldemar Bogorasin Siberia in 1901 -2 (Freed, Freed, and Williamson 1988:101). In addition to Boas' forty-five Thompson Salishcylinders of 1897, Livingston Farrand recorded thirty-four cylinders among the Quinault and another ten ofthe Quileute of Washington State in 1898. On SakhalinIsland in 1898-9, Berthold Laufer recorded Gilyak (Nivkh)and Tungus (Uilta) songs (Boas 1903:97). ^ On the re-lated Harrington Expedition in 1899, Roland Dixon re-corded twenty-one cylinders among the Maidu ofnortheastern California.''

This substantial recording activity is perhaps thegreatest ethnomusicological legacy of the JesupExpedition (Keeling 2001:285-90). The phonograph,although a relatively recent ethnographic medium, wasjust one part of a multi-media set of tools employedby the Jesup Expedition. Like the extensive photogra-phy, primarily of physical types, this activity resultedin the production of a corpus of enduring objectsof otherwise ephemeral culture, which could remainthe basis for future scholarly research (Jacknis 1984,1 996). Years later, writing to museum founder GeorgeHeye in 1927, Boas explained, "I am trying to developgradually a collection of records of Indian speech andsong which, I believe, will be just as important as col-lections of specimens of their handy craft which areaccumulating in museums" (Boas to Heye, 30 Novem-ber 1927, APS-BP).

Although music was treated in several of the JesupExpedition publications, it held a relatively minor posi-tion. Boas shared some insights into the Thompson(NIaka'pamux) recording sessions in letters to his wifeand parents (Rohner 1 969:202-4), but his published

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remarks on music in theJNPE publications are quitebrief. He contributed a chapter on art to Teit's mono-graph, The Thompson Indians (Je\t 1900), including sev-eral pages on types of songs and a description ofmusical instruments (Boas 1900:383-85). Boas' reporton Bella Coola mythology included notations for foursongs, three with texts (Boas 1898:71, 82, 93, 94),with other song texts and translations in passing. Thefirst volume of the Kwakiutl Texts contains a sectionon "Songs" (Boas and Hunt 1905:475-91), with inter-linear translations of 32 song texts, including texts for20 Hamatsa songs and others, plus a description of awinter ceremonial. One reason for this relatively mea-ger output on Boas' part was his conception of hisresearch and publication as an entity. For example, thewinter ceremonial description was a more completeversion of his earlier account in a report that had beenpublished by the Smithsonian Institution (Boas 1897a).Generally, though, he did not repeat in hisJNPE publica-tions the extensive information on music that wascontained in that monograph.

While neither Bogoras nor Jochelson supplied anymusicological analysis, theirJNPE monographs containgood descriptions of music and musical instruments,especially as part of shamanism (Keeling 2001). Bothinclude vivid anecdotes about Native reactions to theirrecording (Bogoras 1 904-7:436; Jochelson 1 908:426-7). Bogoras, for example, offered a very sophisticateddescription of how the Chukchi shaman obscures thesource of the music by modifying the sound of hisvoice with a drum, and another long account of hisuse of the phonograph to explore the nature of "sepa-rate voices" or ritual ventriloquism (Bogoras 1 904-7:434, 436). The most extensive publication on musicto come out of the Jesup Expedition was John R.Swanton's work. Swanton, a student of Boas then em-ployed by the Smithsonian Bureau of American Ethnol-ogy, collected among the Haida in 1900-1 for theAmerican Museum. His JNPE monograph contains ageneral description of Haida songs and a brief sum-mary of song types (Swanton 1905:212), which he

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complemented in a longer study of texts and transla-tions for 106 Haida songs collected on the expedition(Swanton 1912). However, he noted only song textsand enclosed a brief description; there were no tran-scriptions or recordings (cf. Enrico and Stuart 1996).While Farrand,Jochelson, Bogoras, and Laufer recordedmusic, and Swanton obtained many song texts, onlyBoas published transcriptions, as he seems to havebeen the only musically literate person in the team.

Most anthropologists of the time worked with pro-fessional musicologists to first transcribe and then ana-lyze their recordings of Native music (Brady 1984:3).Boas was virtually alone (along with Alice Fletcher) asa fieldworker who was able to make recordings in thenatural context of musical performance, accompaniedwith verbal records in the Native language, and thenmusicologically analyze this material. His training al-lowed him to investigate technical issues of scales,melody, and rhythm. For example, he was perhaps thefirst to note complex rhythmical structures in North-west Coast songs (Ellingson 1992:118; cf. Boas 1888a:51-2). More generally, he also contributed to the firstmajor debate in American ethnomusicology. John C.Fillmore, the collaborator of both Boas and AliceFletcher, adhered to a widespread notion of the pe-riod, that there was a universal harmonic sense, whichwas realized only imperfectly by tribal music (Filmore1893, 1895). Reviewing Fletcher's Study of Omaha In-dian Music (1893), Boas initially accepted Fillmore'stheory "that the underlying sense of harmony is thesame as ours" (Boas 1894b: 171). It is puzzling whyBoas supported this position, now regarded as falseand ethnocentric. Boas' later research showed howeach culture needed to be understood on its ownterms. Boas, like Fillmore, may have been influencedby Hermann Helmholtz's theory of a natural musicalscale based on Western harmony (Myers 1994:xx), orhe may have felt that it actually accorded a degree ofcultural respect to Native musical systems. We do knowthat Boas' early work was marked by evolutionarypositions that he later rejected, and that his thought

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was always caught in intellectual oppositions (Stock-ing 1974:1-20). In any event, towards the end of hiscareer, Boas did reject Fillmore's theory of latent har-mony (Boas 1927:342).

Much of Boas' exploratory writing on NorthwestCoast music was an attempt to classify songs intogenres. In his early essay on KwakiutI songs, he notedchildren's songs, love songs, prayers, and war songs(Boas 1 896). His most definitive research on this topic,left unpublished at his death, was his 1930-1 field trip,during which he was able to clarify the distinctionsbetween summer songs, winter songs, gambling songs,love songs, mourning songs, and baby songs (FranzBoas to George Herzog, 18 April 1933, APS-BP).

As a pioneer linguist. Boas naturally focused on thesetting and language of song texts. With most of hismusical transcriptions, he supplied the words in theNative language and a translation. In his essay on Chi-nook songs, he noted that "the Tsimshian sing manyHaida songs, although they do not understand themeaning of the words" (Boas 1888b:224). From theappended glossary of the Chinook words, he thoughtit interesting "that not more than seventy-four wordsoccur in the collection of thirty-nine songs" (Boas 1888b:225). In several publications, most notably the KwakiutIwinter ceremonial study, he offered a semantic andcultural explanation of the song texts, identif/ing, forexample, the various mythological characters to whichthe songs refer.

Franz Boas is known forthe contextual ethnographicapproach he brought to the study of culture, advocat-ing intensive fieldwork and Native texts over armchairspeculation. Naturally, he contributed to the study ofthe social and performative context of music. For ex-ample, he learned from his first KwakiutI field trip that:

The songs which are sung during thesedances are in part very old, but a consider-able number are new, and native poets andcomposers are continually adding to theirstock of songs. As chorus singing is prac-tised [sic] at all festivals by these Indians,and as the rhythms of the songs are verycomplicated, a good deal of practice is

necessary before an artistic effect can bereached. ... Every village has its singing-master, who instructs young and old, andholds regular rehearsals before each festival.(Boas 1888a:51)

Again, his most elaborate study of this type washis monograph on KwakiutI winter ceremonials, wherehe specifically describes the seating of the musicians;the roles and duties of the song leader (who acts ascomposer and music director), his assistant, and thechorus; and the handling of the instruments (Boas1897a:432, 437); in addition to more general com-ments on the masked dances to which the music is avital accompaniment.

Because of his role as artifact collector and mu-seum curator, there was one otherwise minor field ofmusicology to which Boas made an important contri-bution—organology, or the study of musical instru-ments. He himself collected a full range of NorthwestCoast rattles, whistles, and drums on his many fieldtrips (Cole 1985; Jacknis 2002:23-6). During the JesupExpedition, however, he collected relatively little, shar-ing the responsibility for the Bella Coola and KwakiutIcollections with George Hunt (Jacknis 1991b). An in-sight into Boas' interest in musical instruments is evi-dent in his instruction to the Jesup collectors. For ex-ample, from John Swanton, collecting among the Haida,he requested:

[R]attles also if fully explained. Please inquireparticularly in regard to the significance ofthe raven rattle with hawk face on its lowerside and lying figure on its back. What is thelegend of the origin? How are they used andhow are they held in dances? What is thedifference between these rattles and theround rattles, most of which represent birdsor heads? Are they used in differentceremonials? What is the use of the rattle setwith puffin-beaks? What is the signficance ofthe clapper, most of which represent thekiller-whale? Specimens of all of these, if fullyexplained, are desirable. A series of whistels[sic] with explanations would also be goodto have. Do you consider the flageolet as animitation of European patterns or as theirown invention? (Boas to John Swanton, 5June, 1900, acc. 1901-31, AMNH)

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Boas described these instruments principally in hisstudy of the KwakiutI winter ceremonial (Boas1897a:431^, 437, 438^0, 445). In addressing theiconography of Hamatsa rattles, for example, he notedthe skull motif as a reference to the man-eating themeof the winter ceremonial and the former practice ofkilling slaves (Boas 1 897a:439; cf. Fig. 33). Whistles, hewrote, are considered the voices of spirits (Boas1 897a:447). Perhaps because Northwest Coast instru-ments are comparatively simple in form, it was thesesorts of contextual topics that Boas addressed, asopposed to the more usual musicological concerns ofinstrument form, construction, and tuning.

One area of research—a major Boasian orientationthat underlay the entire Jesup Expedition—was diffu-sion and history. Boas, however, did little direct writ-ing on this aspect of Native music. Perhaps he felt thatit was first necessary to compile an adequate sampleand description. This omission is particularly striking inthat such issues of areal relations were the ostensiblerationale for the expedition's work. In his summary es-says, he did cite mythological and artifactual patterns,but nothing from music, most likely because the musi-cal collections were relatively small and because theywere not transcribed. Nevertheless, as he often didwith his many research topics. Boas suggested thissubject to his later students, George Herzog (1930)and Helen H. Roberts (1936).

Franz Boas did, however, make an important con-tribution to the study of more recent history. It iscommonly claimed that he was uninterested in stud-ies of acculturation; but one of his most fascinatingmusicological essays, "Chinook Songs" (Boas 1888b),was devoted to the music of the urban Indians ofVictoria, Vancouver, and New Westminster, B.C. Largelymigrant workers, they labored in the saw mills, canner-ies, and hop fields. Boas published thirty-eight songtexts and translations, as well as two melodies inmusical transcription. The texts—composed in a com-plex linguistic Creole that combined English, Chinook,and other Native Northwest Coast languages—mostly

expressed feelings of loneliness and lost love. For in-stance, "When the steamboat leaves/ Say good-bye,Jimmy!/ Billy will feel very sad" (Boas 1 888b:224), withthe words "steamboat" and "good-bye, Jimmy" in En-glish. In his analysis. Boas noted the contexts of perfor-mance and transmission.

Throughout his mature career, Boas dedicated him-self to creating the institutional structures of scholar-ship; and ethnomusicology was no exception. Largelyas a result of the use of the phonograph, the 1890swas the critical decade for the institutionalization ofthe field (Lee 1993:21, cf. Densmore 1927). Boas knewand corresponded with the leading students of Ameri-can Indian music, among them Alice C. Fletcher, JamesA. Mooney, Washington Matthews, George Bird Grinnell,John C. Fillmore, and Benjamin I. Gilman. In the Journalof American Folk-Lore, he favorably reviewed AliceFletcher's pioneering A Study of Omaha Indian Music(Boas 1894b). In December 1898, he invited Fletcher,Matthews, and Carl Lumholtz to join him in demon-strating some of their recordings of Indian songs atthe annual meeting of the American Folklore Society(AFS) (e.g.. Boas to G. B. Grinnell, 23 December 1898,AMNH-DA; cf. Newell 1899:53-4). This led to the for-mation of an AFS committee on American folk music,which Boas cHaired. As part of this effort. Boas came incontact with leading musicians and composers of hisday. He asked his Columbia colleague EdwardMacDowell to serve on the committee. AlthoughMacDowell declined. Boas did use another local com-poser, Frederick R. Burton, to transcribe some of therecorded songs. These composers, along with ArthurFarwell, Charles Wakefield Cadman, and R. Carlos Troyer,were loosely referred to as "the American Indianists"(Pisani 1998). There is no record of Boas' personal opin-ion on their creative work, but the Native music thathe and his colleagues were recording was a vital stimu-lus to contemporary composers who were attempt-ing to create a genuinely American music.

As a German immigrant, Boas naturally main-tained scholarly ties with his homeland. He actively

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shared his research on Northwest Coast Indian musicwith two of the founders of the so-called "Berlin schoolof comparative musicology": Carl Stumpf and his stu-dent Erich von Hornbostel (Christensen 1991). Just asBoas had sent his early Bella Coola transcriptions toStumpf, in 1905 he lent forty-three of the Thompsoncylinders to his old colleague, then at the University ofBerlin, evidently at his request (cf. Boas to Stumpf, 1 3November 1905, AMNH-DA). Von Hornbostel, with hiscolleague Otto Abraham, used them as the basis foran important early essay in ethnomusicology (Abrahamand von Hornbostel 1975 [1906]). Some of these cyl-inders were reproduced by the Berlin Phonogramm-Archiv and subsequently included in the Archives' Dem-onstration Collection (Reinhard 1971; Reinhard and List1963). First produced in the early 1920s, copies of the120-cylinder set were distributed to archives through-out the world—"the first anthology of traditionalmusic ever issued" (Seeger and Spear 1987:89). Boascontinued to teach and encourage growth in the field,training scholars such as George Herzog (who hadpreviously studied under von Hornbostel) and HelenH. Roberts. Through these German connections, Boasinfused the study of American Indian music with aninternational perspective.

Boas' research on music had implications beyondits own sphere of study. As music was the art to whichhe was most personally attracted, it seems to havebecome the model for his aesthetic theory, and helpsto explain the origins of his rather idiosyncratic theoryof primitive art (Boas 1927). Boas suggested that alldecorative patterns were derived from a craftsperson'smotor patterns Gacknis 1992:1 58). Using the word "vir-tuoso"—a term common in musical criticism—Boasclaimed that designs, indeed all formal patterns, werecreated out of the rhythmical actions necessary to pro-duce the work. In support of this. Boas examined rhyth-mic patterns in visual, verbal, and musical art forms.Although his theory has it roots in German aesthetics,it must have appealed to someone who was familiarwith the nature of artistic (i.e., musical) performance.

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As in all his work. Boas' research on music wasdevoted to the critique of then-popular notions ofcultural evolution and to the promotion of culturalequality. In his first essay on Native music, he arguedthat "the mind of the native enjoys as well the beau-ties of nature as we do; that he expresses his grief inmournful songs, and appreciates humorous concep-tions" (Boas 1887a:383). At the same time, however.Boas' anthropology was committed to appreciatingcultures on their own terms. In his now-classic debatewith Smithsonian ethnologist Otis T. Mason over theprinciples of museum classification, he prominently em-ployed a musical example: "From a collection of stringinstruments, flutes, or drums of'savage' tribes and themodern orchestra, we cannot derive any conclusionbut that similar means have been applied by all peoplesto make music. The character of their music, the onlyobject worth studying, which determines the form ofthe instruments, cannot be understood from the singleinstrument, but requires a complete collection of thesingle tribe" (Boas 1887b:62). Note his emphasis, thatthe character of their music was the only object worthstudying. He elaborated this contextual approach inthe next response in the debate:

The rattle, for instance, is not merely theoutcome of the idea of making noise, and ofthe technical methods applied to reach thisend: it is, besides this, the outcome ofreligious conceptions, as any noise may beapplied to invoke or drive away spirits; or itmay be the outcome of the pleasure childrenhave in noise of any kind; and its form maybe characteristic of the art of the people.Thus the same implement belongs to verydifferent departments of a psychologicalmuseum. (Boas 1887b:65; see Fig. 33)

Nowhere could one find a better and more suc-cinct example of Boas' approach to the study of cul-ture. ' It was perhaps not an accident that Boas choseto use musical examples to make a general culturalcritique. Such a perspective would come to influencethe study of Northwest Coast and other Native mu-sics, as much as it affected anthropology in general.For Franz Boas, music was not a limited or specialized

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phenomenon, but actually lay at the core of humanculture and thus of anthropology.

Recording Thompson Indian Music, 1897

In June 1897, in Spences Bridge, B.C., Boas recordedThompson Indian music with the assistance of JamesA. Teit (Rohner 1969:202^; cf. Wickwire 1 988, 2001,this volume). Without doubt, these Thompson sessionswere the most important musicological contributionsof the entire Jesup Expedition project: first becausethey involved Boas, the expedition leader; second,because they were the most extensive musical research(as opposed to sheer recording) of the six-year expedi-tion fieldwork; third, because they were Boas' firstsound recording in the field; and finally because of theirsubsequent analysis in a pioneering essay in ethnomu-sicology (Abraham and von Hornbostel 1975 [1906]).In this section we consider how sound recording, likeall ethnographic transcription, can be regarded as theoutcome of a social interaction resulting in cultural rep-resentations. Like Native-made artifacts, these objectsmust be understood within their generating context.

The visiting JNPE team—consisting of Boas, Farrand,and Smith—spent about ten days in Spences Bridge(Fig. 34), arriving on the evening of June 3, and leavingthe morning of June 14. In addition to sound recording,the party took photographs, plaster casts, and mea-surements of people, and gathered a small collectionof artifacts (see Thom 2001:141-2; Wickwire, this vol-ume). They began recording songs on June 6, docu-menting ten songs in the first session, with anotherthirty-five cylinders recorded over the next two days(Wickwire 1993:544). The sessions took place in Teit'shouse; given the insensitivity of early phonographs,the recording would have been improved by an in-door setting.^ Earlier cylinder machines were rather large,bulky, and heavy; but by the mid-1890s several com-panies had introduced home models that were muchsmaller and lighter (Fig. 35). "About the size and weightof a portable sewing machine today" (Brady 1984:4),such an apparatus could be packed on horseback, as

did Boas and the JNPE team. Although some were orcould be driven by an electric motor fitted with a bat-tery, many of the home models were treadle or springdriven and thus were perfect for field recording. Andlike the modern tape recorder, the same machine couldbe used for recording and play-back.

Like photography, sound recording is a focusedsocial interaction, minimally involving the ethnographerand the Native performers. In this case, however, acritical player was James Teit (1 854-1 922). Just as Boascollaborated with George Hunt among the Bella Coolaand KwakiutI, here, too, he relied on a local field assis-tant (see Wickwire, this volume). For the Jesup Expedi-tion, Boas selected Teit to be the prime researcher forthe Plateau tribes of British Columbia. After participat-ing in the 1897 recording session, he went on to doimportant musicological research under the auspicesof the Anthropological Division of the Geological Sur-vey of Canada. With a phonograph acquired in 1912,Teit recorded 250 songs, now preserved in the Cana-dian Museum of Civilization (Wickwire 1988,2001:336).

Teit undoubtedly was responsible for selecting thesix singers to be recorded. In fact, several of themwere his relatives by marriage: Lucy Antko (his wife.Fig. 36), Xwalinek (her sister), and Nsilkapeskit (her sister'sson; Wickwire 2001 :n.7, 449). Just as Hunt tended togo first to his relatives Oacknis 1991 b:211), Teit musthave found it easier to involve people he knew well.This rapport was critical, as Boas encountered someinitial resistance to his recording: "Some of the peoplewere bashful, especially the women, who did not wantto sing until all the men had left the house" (Rohner1969: 204). In fact, four of the six singers were female(Wickwire 1993:544). As Wickwire points out, Teit'sethnography was especially sensitive to women's is-sues, probably because of his marriage to Antko.

Boas indicated that gender was an issue in the per-formance, but the singers may have also been reluc-tant to be recorded by a strange contraption. The pho-nograph was relatively new for everybody, and espe-cially so for Native people. The machines used during

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the Jesup Expedition were undoubtedly the first thatthese people had ever experienced, which explainedthe strong feelings of surprise frequently expressed (cf.Brady 1999:1 10).Thompson people also had prob-lems with being photographed (Hill-Tout 1978:64). "But their initial shyness gave way to pleasure, aidedperhaps by the machine's reproductive abilities, as Boasnoted that "The singing was a great deal of fun for thevillagers" (Rohner 1969:204).

This inter-social encounter produced objects thattranscribed or represented aspects of Native cultural"reality" Oacknis 1996). With his methodological sophis-tication. Boas spent much of the 1890s attempting toascertain the strengths and weakness of cylinder re-cording as an ethnographic medium. On the one hand,a cylinder recording was an indexical representationof actual acoustical phenomena. Within its limitations,it could more accurately record the sonic data apartfrom the filter of an observer's abilities and knowledge.And it was easier to capture a song by this meansthan from the repeated singing necessary to producemusical notation. Despite their obvious benefits. Boaswas acutely aware of the limitations of the cylindermachines. Early phonographs could not accuratelyrecord rhythm, faint notes, or the sounds of choral orinstrumental ensembles that were common on theNorthwest Coast. Even more critical, many musical per-formances, among the Thompson as well as theKwakiutI, lasted several hours, while wax cylinderscould record only for short periods (an average of threeminutes for a four-inch cylinder, and nine minutes for asix-inch one).'-^ During his 1893 Chicago World's Fairsession. Boas overcame this limitation by recording asingle song across two cylinders; but in Spences Bridge,motivated perhaps by a shortage of cylinders, he wasforced to use the machine more as a sampler. Theeffect of such technological limits was to create thesong as a bounded musical object and unit ofethnomusicological study (cf. Shelemay 1991:280).

With his interest in context. Boas clearly realizedthat there was more to a song performance than the

physical sound. While recording the singing of the Th-ompson, he noted the vivid acting and gestures thataccompanied the performance:

"The singers became ecstatic and acted outall their old stories and ceremonies whilethey sang. One of them sang a prayer. Whilesinging he danced and reached out to thesun with both arms while looking upward.Then he brought them down slowly, lookingto the ground. Before that he had crossed hishands in front of his chest with the palmsoutward, moving them to the left and to theright as if he wanted to embrace the celestialbody" (Rohner 1969:203).

To his parents, he added,

"An old woman sang the song into thephonograph which serves to 'cleanse'women who had borne twins. She tookbundles of fir branches and hit her shouldersand breast with them while she danced. Thesong imitates the growl of the grizzly bearbecause they believe that the children derivefrom the grizzly bear" (Rohner 1 969:204).

Despite noting this detailed description. Boas did notgo on to complain about the phonograph's failure torecord such gestures, evidently resigning himself to itslimitations. On the other hand, perhaps his sensitivityto such failure of transcription led him in 1930-1, atthe age of seventy-two, to use a movie camera todocument KwakiutI music and dance.

Returning to New York, Boas had these cylinderscataloged, but he himself was never able to seriouslystudy them. In his musical research, as in all his work.Boas generally devoted more effort to description thananalysis. By himself or with colleagues he managed totranscribe most of his recordings, but his musical analy-ses tended to be partial and expressed in short essaysand passages of monographs rather than in longer,specialized works. Although not all his transcriptionswere published. Boas undoubtedly felt compelled topublish as many as possible because they were theprincipal form, at the time, of reproducing the music. Inthese early years of sound recording, the available tech-nology could produce multiple copies only with greatdifficulty. When a system of mastering was developed

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a few years later, there was no commercial market forthese cylinders, and thus there was no incentive toreproduce them in quantities. Boas did make copies ofhis wax cylinders, but they were inevitably distortedfrom the original, and there was a limit as to how manycopies could be made before the original signal wasobliterated. Thus transcription was as much a form ofreproduction (and presen>/ation) as it was analysis.

As in his linguistic and ethnographic research, Boaswas keenly interested in the methodological implica-tions of these alternate forms of transcription. In oneof his earliest ethnological essays, "On AlternatingSounds" (Boas 1889b), he had called attention to therole of observer bias in the transcription of exotic lan-guages. In fact, it is hard to tell which was more funda-mental for Boas—his approach to musical or linguistictranscription. Moreover, his early training in psycho-physics and acoustics, which he applied primarily tolinguistics (cf. IVIackert 1994), also laid a foundation forhis musicological research. After using the phonographfor the first time at the Chicago Fair, he made a carefulstudy of the usefulness of the machine. Working inparallel. Boas transcribed melodies by ear, while Fillmoremade his transcriptions from the cylinder recordings.Boas then subjected these to re-analysis during his nextfield trip in the fall of 1894. His publication of the re-sults (Boas 1896, 1897a) was the first comparativeinvestigation of the transcriptions of the same songsby different transcribers. Although he complained tohis wife that Fillmore's music was "not very accurate"(Rohner 1969:178-9), when he published them heclaimed that "on the whole" their respective "render-ings of the music agree closely" (Boas 1 896:1). In anycase, for Boas it was necessary to continually confirmhis ethnographic transcriptions, so that one could besure that they represented Native culture and not ob-server bias.

Boas was not alone in preferring transcription tothe actual recording. According to Richard Keeling,

"Early collectors seem to have regarded themachine more as a sampling device or as an

aid for producing written transcriptions thanas a means of recording actual performancepractice. While this approach to field record-ing partially reflects theoretical presumptionsthat seem archaic nowadays, the methodol-ogy was due in great part to technologicallimitations of the equipment itself (Keeling1991:xiii, cf. Brady 1984:9).

Thus scholars such as Boas and Fillmore played theircylinders over and over again to ensure the accuracyof their transcriptions, in the process drastically de-grading the surfaces of the grooves and their ability topreserve the music.

Like Native artifacts, these cylinders were associ-ated with documentation that reflected their creation.Wickwire has noted the differences in Boas' and Teit'sfield notes from this session.

"Boas made notes of only the cylindernumber, the tribal affiliation (ThompsonIndians'), the type of song ('Dancing song,love song, religious song,' etc.), the place ofrecording ('Spence's Bridge'), and the re-corder ('F. Boas'). By way of contrast, Teitmade note of the Native names of thesingers ('Kaxpftsa', 'Antko', etc.), the Nativenames of song-types ("s'tlae'eski"-dancesong, etc.), and incidental material such asthe flexibility of the words used in the songs"(Wickwire 1988:189, cf. 2001).'^

She also notes that Teit's post-1 91 2 recordings weremuch better documented, including the Native nameof the singer, a reference to photographs, how thesinger learned the song, a Native text and transla-tion, and other information such as the age or im-portance of the song or its ceremonial context. Anyanalyis would depend on the kind and amount ofdocumentation that accompanied the recordedmusic. Commenting on the nature of museum docu-mentation, Tom McFeat observed that "object+ data= specimen, where by 'data' one means notes, mea-surements, drawings, charts, graphs, photographs,and models" (McFeat 1967:93; italics original). Theobject alone is not sufficient as a cultural represen-tation. This equation is as true for sound recordingsas it is for photographs and artifacts. Unfortunately,such minimal or partial documentation was common

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in many archives of early sound recordings (Seegerand Spear 1987:11-2).

Boas drew upon this documentation for his briefdiscussion of music in Teit's JNPE monograph (Teit1900).'" However, the principal analysis of these songswas done by his German colleagues Abraham and vonHornbostel (1906). Although Boas would have preferredto have the study published by the American Museum,he felt it was acceptable for it to appear under otherauspices as long as proper credit were given (Boas toCarl Stumpf, 13 November 1905, AMNH). The result-ing essay was actually published in a Festschrift dedi-cated to Boas. This article was one of the first sophis-ticated analyses of the musical content of NativeAmerican songs, based on recordings of actual perfor-mances and the transcriptions of forty-three songs. Theessay is divided into two parts: "scales" and "rhythm,tempo, structure, and performance practice." AlthoughAbraham and von Hornbostel analyzed notes and in-tervals using Western musical terminology (e.g., thirds,tonic, semi-tone), they observed, "But the fact that theseconcepts, taken from our notions of harmony, cannotbe readily applied to Indian music is obvious from themany cases in which the singing departs from pureintonation of the consonant intervals" (1975:303). Theyhad compared the relative tones to measurements ofabsolute pitch, based on a standard tone. Offering astatistical analysis of the intervals, they confrontedFillmore's argument about "feeling of latent harmony,"which Boas had supported. Instead, Abraham andvon Hornbostel concluded, tactfully perhaps, that"this delicate psychological question is today notyet ready for discussion" (1975:306).

Turning to a rhythmic analysis, they admitted toencountering "great difficulty in the rhythmic structureand metrical arrangements of many of the melodies"(Abraham and von Hornbostel 1975:302). As Boas hadfound earlier, they noted the complex rhythms andirregular combinations of beats, and the varying rela-tion of the drumming patterns to the singing (on thethirty-five songs accompanied by percussion). Finally,

I. JACKNIS

they made a few, brief remarks about the quality ofthe vocal production. Their only contextual commentswere that "most of the songs are dance or game songs;others are designated as lyrical, religious, and 'medi-cine' songs. But a specific musical characterization ofthe types according to use could not be made"(Abraham and von Hornbostel 1975:309).

Music and Culture/Description and Analy-sis: The Legacy of the JNPE Recordings

Franz Boas never wrote the concluding volume of theJesup Expedition reports, summarizing its findings, andit is now the common view that the Expedition's great-est legacy was its numerous accumulated collections(e.g., Krupnik and Vakhtin, this volume). The ThompsonIndian recordings were analyzed, although not by Boashimself. That study, however, raises important ques-tions about interpretative modes and disciplinary per-spectives.

Citing their "lack of precise knowledge of theculture," Abraham and von Hornbostel admitted thatthey were necessarily "limited to strictly musical con-siderations" (1975:301). The implication was thatBoas did not share with them any of the contextualinformation that he and especially Teit had recorded.As Wickwire observes: "Only Boas' information wasused in the analysis nor were any of the singers'names mentioned. Only the English names of thesong-types were given" (Wickwire 1988:1 90).Shealso cites errors the German researchers made be-cause they were not aware of the cultural context.On one song, what Teit called an exhaling sound,indicating blessing or good will, they interpreted asan inhaling sound denoting tension or excitement(Wickwire 2001:444). We have the sound on thecylinders but what does it mean and, more impor-tantly, what does it represent?

Why did Boas not publish information on the cul-tural context of Thompson songs, as he had for theKwakiutl?To some extent, these omissions stem fromthe fact that Thompson ethnography was somewhat

1 1 5

marginal to Boas' own research and writing. Over thecourse of decades, he managed to publish quite a bitabout KwakiutI music; but it took a while and singleessays were often limited. From a more fundamentalperspective, however, this objectivist perspective char-acterized all of Boas' ethnography to some extent.Like Abraham and von Hornbostel, Boas often treatedcultural elements as if they were discrete and isolable.As I have suggested elsewhere (Jacknis 1996), whileBoas moved to a more contextual approach over time,this shift was never complete. Moreover, specific de-tails of his fieldwork were rarely noted in his ethnogra-phy, just as he tended to describe cultures in collec-tive rather than individual terms. In this analysis. Boasand von Hornbostel may have been the more sophis-ticated musicologists, but Teit had the best understand-ing of the culture. His work, then, was edited largelyby Boas.

Perhaps even more important than making avail-able documents of unique performances, recordingsalso allowed comparison. Just as the invention of pho-tography was necessary to the development of arthistory, so did sound recording facilitate the cre-ation of (ethno)musicology. A recording makes pos-sible an analysis by scholars—such as Abraham andvon Hornbostel—who were not present at the originalperformance. (Although this is the goal of transcrip-tions, no system of musical notation can completelycapture all important aspects of a performance, a prob-lem made all the more difficult when dealing with non-Western—and frequently non-literate—cultures. More-over, without recordings even transcriptions weredifficult to obtain). As Brady cautions, however, "with-out personal knowledge of the cultural context in whichthe recordings were made, many early armchair com-parative musicologists reached conclusions and de-veloped theories that were skeptically received evenby their contemporaries" (Brady 1984:3). A full analysisof the Thompson songs thus required both formal andcontextual information. The contrast between the

purely formal analysis of Abraham and Hornbostelcompared to the detailed cultural notes of Teitpresages a persisting tension in ethnomusicology.As expressed in the 1960s and early 1970s, musi-cologists such as Mantle Hood (1971) held that itwas necessary for scholars to be able to play andtechnically analyze Native musics, while anthropolo-gists such as Alan Merriam (1964) stressed the im-portance of investigating their cultural context (cf.NettI 1991:267).

One hundred years later, what are we to make ofthese recordings and of Boas' ethnomusicologicalresearch? Because of his personal interest in music,and his dual background in science and the humani-ties, Franz Boas realized the importance of recordingand of studying the music of Native peoples. For apublic museum, devoted to the display of artifacts, tosystematically collect sound recordings was an en-lightened policy. Against some opposition on the partof the museum's administration (jacknis 1985:104-5),Boas was able to argue that the expedition supportedby PresidentJesup needed to return home with as manykinds of records as possible to document these "van-ishing cultures." As one of the pioneers of ethnomusi-cology, Boas encouraged several members of the ex-pedition, who might not otherwise have investigatedthis topic, to make valuable records and observations.The sound archives that Boas initiated formed the ba-sis for much of the major collections in this country.Over time, these cylinder recordings, like the photo-graphs and all the other collections of the Jesup Expe-dition, have become historical sources in their ownright, as cultures—and especially practices of musicalperformance—change. Contemporary scholars as wellas the descendants of their Native singers can go backand appreciate these objects with keen appreciation.And while we may not know as much as we wouldlike about these recordings, they remain, as Boas in-tended (Stocking 1974:123): "the foundation of allfuture researches."

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Acknowledgments

For research assistance and valuable discussion of theseissues, I am deeply grateful to Wendy C. Wickwire. Asthe references make clear, I am particularly indebtedto her for information on the 1 897 Spences Bridgerecording session. Thanks also go to Thomas Ross Millerand Richard Keeling for their help and information. Iwould like to dedicate this essay to my late friendDouglas Cole, who graciously shared his unpublishedresearch on Franz Boas.

Notes

1. For reasons of historical consistency, Iuse the ethnic names that Boas employed in hiswriting. The contemporary names for thesepeoples are as follows: KwakiutI are theKwakwaka'wakw, Bella Coola are the Nuxalk,Thompson are the NIaka'pamux, and BaffinlandEskimo are the Inuit.

2. Thomas Edison patented his phonographicrecording machine in 1 877, but it did not becomecommercially available until 1889 (Keeling1991 :xii). For pre-1900 collections of AmericanIndian music, see Cillis 1 984; also Densmore 1 927;Brady 1984; Seeger and Spear 1987; Lee 1993;Myers 1994:xiii; and Keeling 2001.

3. In addition to the Smithsonian Bureau ofAmerican Ethnology (3240 cylinders, ca. 1933),other anthropology museums with music collec-tions were the University of California Museum(271 3), National Museum of Canada (1 530), FieldMuseum (1500), and University of PennsylvaniaMuseum. The American Museum of Natural His-tory had about 2500 cylinders (Inman 1986:3).Undoubtedly, the AMNH was a model for the sub-stantial sound collections in California, directedby Boas' student Alfred Kroeber, beginning in1901 (Keeling 1991;Jacknis 2003). Indirectly, itwas also the basis for the large collection at theArchives of Traditional Music at Indiana Univer-sity. Much of the American Museum collection wascopied for Columbia University by another of Boas'students, George Herzog, between 1936 and1 948, and taken to Indiana in 1 948 when Herzogwas appointed to the faculty. In 1961 the AMNHdeposited its collection—including the recordings

from the Jesup Expedition—at the Archives of Tra-ditional Music at Indiana University.

4. Extant documentation attributes the col-lection to both Jochelson and Bogoras, but as weknow that the Bogorases made ninety-five pho-nographic records, the Jochelsons probably madethe remaining forty-four. Furthermore, we knowthat Jochelson worked with the Koryak, Tungus[Even], Yukagir, and Yakut [Sakha], while Bogorasspent time with the Chukchi and Siberian Eskimo[Yupikj. According to the Indiana University soundarchives (Cillis 1984:345), the Siberian cylindercollection comprises: Koryak (18), Yukagir (10),Yakut (6); and Chukchi (28), Russians (45), Tungus(5), Aivan [Yupik] Eskimo (8); for a total of 120surviving cylinders. On a tribal basis, this wouldgive thirty-nine to Jochelson and eighty-one toBogoras, which should be roughly correct.

5. Although Berthold Laufer refers to soundrecording in his correspondence with Boas, thesecylinders have not been located (cf. Keeling2001:280). The Archives of Traditional Music atIndiana University does have his Chinese musicfrom the American Museum and his Indian and Ti-betan collection from the Field Museum. As weknow that Laufer worked among the Tungus, thosecylinders listed under Bogoras and Jochelson'sname may be his, but Jochelson also worked withthe Yukagirized Tungus.

6. Again, the dating of the Maidu collectionis uncertain. The Archives of Traditional Music, In-diana University, indicates a 1910 date for this(Seeger and Spear 1987:40), which would be un-likely from what we know of Dixon's Maidu field-work; in one 1903 letter Dixon refers to recording"last year" (Dixon to Boas, 26 March 1903, AMNH-DA).

7. From a more technical perspective, such acritique was directly addressed to the evolution-ary displays in which all the musical instrumentsof the world were grouped according to techni-cal attributes (i.e., production of sound from vi-brating strings, membranes, or columns of air in atube), popular in institutions such as Oxford's Pitt-Rivers Museum and the Smithsonian. The Berlinschool of "comparative musicology" developedJust such a universal system of classification formusical instruments (Hornbostel and Sachs 1961[1914]; cf. Kartomi 1990:167-74), one which has

I. JACKNIS

1 1 7

become the basis for most subsequent analysis.Despite his ties to German scholarship, Boas seemsto have had little interest in such approaches. In-stead, almost all of his musicological research andwriting came in the context of specific culturesand regions.

8. Although Boas writes of going "down tothe village" to collect melodies (Rohner ) 969:202),Teit's catalogue of the song sessions states thatthe songs were "recorded on Phonograph by Dr.Boas (at Teit's house), June 1 897" (Archives of Tra-ditional Music, Indiana University, cf. Wickwire2001:432, 434, 437). Furthermore, Boas refers tothe singing occurring in "the house" (Rohner1969:204).

9. After the stay in Spences Bridge, there isno further mention of the phonograph. At the endof July, however, Harlan Smith complained to aclerk at the American Museum that the phono-graph cylinders and photographic plates that themuseum had sent to Victoria in May were miss-ing. Consequently, he had to "do without the pho-nograph cylinders" (Smith to John Winser, 30July1897, AMNH, cited in Mathe and Miller 2001:1 10).After leaving Spences Bridge, Smith had goneto Kamloops, which was Shuswap (Secwepemc)territory, and Lytton, Thompson territory, wherehe focused on archaeology and physical anthro-pology (Thom 2001:142-3). Perhaps he was notable to make projected recordings because ofthese missing cylinders. Wickwire (personal com-munication 1998) suggests that the Jesup teamleft the machine with Teit, who continued torecord songs, or Farrand might have used it thefollowing year in Washington State. In any case, itis clear that the American Museum had severalphonographs.

10. Several members of the Jesup Expedi-tion noted the impression that sound recordingmade among Native people. Both Jochelson(among the Koryak) and Laufer (among theGilyak) reported similar Native beliefs that therehad to be a little man inside the machine withan amazing ability to learn songs Qochelson1908:426-7; Laufer to Boas, 4 March 1899, inBoas 1903:97). Negative reactions to this mi-metic ability were also expressed. Jochelsonwrote: "Older people [of Kamenskoye] stop theyounger ones from singing into the phonograph

saying [that] 'the old one' as they call the pho-nograph will take their voices and they'll die"(Jochelson to Boas, 3 December 1900, in Kendall,Mathe, Miller 1 997:39). Because of such feelings,performances were sometimes modified: "In Si-beria, some shamans forbade the phonographrecording of actual ceremonies, instead perform-ing special demonstrations in front of the ma-chine. Besides the possibility that the record-ings might be used for evil purposes, they wereconcerned that spirits would fly into the record-ing horn and be trapped irretrievably inside thephonograph box" (op. cit., pp. 36-7).

1 1. Somewhat similar to the reactions to thephonograph were Native responses to cameras,which were much more familiar, especially on theNorthwest Coast (Blackman 1982; Rohner1969:189; Kendall, Mathe, Miller 1997:33). Un-like that tool, however, the recording could beplayed back immediately for the subjects.

12. Probably because of their lack of sonicsensitivity, Boas found cylinder machines to be oflittle use for recording speech: "I have used thephonograph quite a good deal for certain pur-poses, and particularly for recording Indian mu-sic. I find that it is absolutely without any valuefor recording Indian languages" (Boas to D. P.Penhallow, 10 February 1899, AMNH-DA)

1 3. The respective field notes are: Franz Boas,1897, unpublished note, copy from Archives ofTraditional Music, Indiana University; James Teit,1897, unpublished notes on songs, Salish Ethno-graphic Notes, APS.

14. There are a few tantalizing clues thatHarlan Smith was to have analyzed the Thomp-son music. Writing in Spences Bridge in 1 897, Boascasually noted, "the other night when he [Smith]took down the songs . . ." (Rohner 1969:205).See note 9 on the possibility of Smith's use of thephonograph. On one list of potential Jesup Expe-dition publications. Smith was listed as the au-thor of "Songs of the Thompson Indians" (cf. F. W.Putnam to Boas, 12 August [?] 1903, AMNH-DA).

15. Of the texts for the Thompson Riversongs. Boas wrote years later, "If I remembercorrectly I sent the words to Hornbostel, but Iam not sure" (Boas to George Herzog, 18 April1933, APS-BP).

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2000 Das Berliner Phonogramm-Archiv 1900-2000: Sammlung der traditionellen Musik der Welt[The Berlin Phonogramm-Archiv, 1900-2000: Col-lections of Traditional Music of the World]. Bilingual(German/English) edition. Berlin: Verlag furWissenschaft und Bildung.

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1974 The Shaping of American Anthropology, 1883-1911: a Franz Boas Reader. New York: Basic Books.

Swanton, John R.

1905 Contributions to the Ethnology of the Haida. TheJesup North Pacific Expedition, vol. 5, pt. 1, pp. 1 -300.Memoirs of the American Museum of Natural History,8(1). Leiden: E.J. Brill; New York: G. E. Stechert.

1912 Haida Songs. Publications of the AmericanEthnological Society 3:1-63.

Stumpf, Carl

1 886 LiederderBellakula-lndianer. Vierteljahrschrift

fur Musikwissenschaft, 11:405-26.Teit, James A.

1 900 The Thompson Indians of British Columbia.The Jesup North Pacific Expedition, vol. 1, pt.4, pp.

I. JACKNIS

163-392. Memoirs of the American Museum of Natu-ral History, 2. New York: C. E. Stechert.Thom, Brian

2001 Harlan I. Smith'sJesup Fieldwork on the North-west Coast. In Gateways. Exploring the Legacy ofthe Jesup North Pacific Expedition, / 897-1902. IgorKrupnik and William W. Fitzhugh, eds. Pp. 139-1 80. Contributions to Circumpolar Anthropology, 1.Washington DC: Arctic Studies Center.

Wickwire, Wendy C.

1 988 James A. Teit: His Contribution to CanadianEthnomusicology. The Canadian Journal of Native Stud-ies 8(2): 183-204.

1 993 Women in Ethnography: the Research of JamesA. Teit. Ethnohistory40{4):Si9-62.

2001 The Grizzly Bear Cave Them Song: James Teitand Franz Boas Interpret Twin Ritual in AboriginalBritish Columbia, 1 897-1920. American Indian Quar-terly 25(3) A3 ^-52.

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^etjOnd ^OaS? Keassessmg the Contribution o(- "Infand "jxesearch /Assistant": James /\. T^ei't

ormant^

WENDY WICKWIRE

Few of the many early anthropologists who worked inthe Pacific Northwest were more productive than JamesA. Teit (1 864-1922). For the Plateau region, Teit gener-ated a rich ethnographic record of over 2,000 pagesin forty-two published sources, and another 5,000pages in thirty-four unpublished sources (Sprague1991:103). He also collected artifacts, took photo-graphs, made sketches, collected plant specimens,and recorded songs on wax cylinders. Much of thiswork was undertaken under the direction of FranzBoas and thejesup North Pacific Expedition (JNPE),an arrangement in which Teit is often seen as an"assistant" and "informant to Boas."' Yet, given the pro-digious, independent, and high quality of his output,it is time to re-evaluate Teit as an anthropologist inhis own right.''

Teit's role in the JNPE was to document the inte-rior regions of British Columbia and, in so doing, filla noticeable gap in the ethnographic record. Boasdevoted much of his own time and attention to thecentral coastal region, partly because this is wherehe had good contacts, and also because his fewethnographic field trips inland had not gone well.In fact, without Teit's assistance. Boas'JNPE outputwould have been substantially smaller. When onelooks closely at Teit's on-the-ground work for theJNPE, it could be argued that his contribution notonly stands on its own, but in many ways goesbeyond that of Boas.

A Timely Meeting in 1894

James Alexander Teit was the eldest of 12 childrenborn into a merchant family in the town of Lerwick inthe Shetland Islands (Fig. 37). In 1884, two years afterfinishing secondary school in Lerwick, Teit travelled toCanada to Join his Uncle John Murray at Spences Bridgeon the Thompson River in south central British Colum-bia (Fig. 38)^ Murray owned a popular trading outlet inthe village (Figs. 39, 40). As his uncle's employee, Teitcame into regular contact with the local NIaka'pamuxpeople who lived in the region (Fig. 41).'' He obviouslyestablished immediate rapport with the latter, for withinthree years, he had taken up residence with SusannahLucy Antko, a member of the Spences Bridge Band(Fig. 42). When not working in the store, Teit under-took whatever jobs were available, for example, ranch-ing, fruit farming, hunting, and ferry work.^

Teit's life took an unusual turn in September 1 894when he encountered Franz Boas who was in the re-gion to complete work for his sixth and second-to-last field season for the Committee of the British Asso-ciation for the Advancement of Science (BAAS) for theStudy of Northwestern Tribes of Canada in British Co-lumbia. En route by train from the Okanagan Valley tothe coast, Boas had decided to spend a night atSpences Bridge. On hearing of a local man, a "Scots-man" who was married to "an Indian woman [whoknew] ... a great deal about the Indians and wasespecially kind," Boas immediately tracked him down

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at his small ranch across the river from his hotel (F.Boas to M. Boas, 21 September 1894, Rohner1969:140). Seeing him so at ease with his wife andher relatives and quite fluent in their language. Boasemployed him on the spot (Figs. 43, 44). As he ex-plained it to his wife in a letter: "The young man is atreasure [who] knows a great deal about Indian tribes.I engaged him right away" (F. Boas to M. Boas, 21September 1894, Rohner 1969:139). With Teit's as-sistance. Boas instantly gained access to a cultural re-gion that hitherto was not well represented on his eth-nographic map.

A Link to the Interior

The demands of the BAAS survey on Boas were great.Horatio Hale, an American philologist who had retiredto Ontario, was charged with directing Boas' fieldworkin the Pacific Northwest. Hale's instructions to Boaswere to "give an ethnological description of the wholeregion [of British Columbia], from north to south, with-out omitting any stock" (Rohner 1 969:81). Hale, whohad worked in Oregon as a member of the WilkesExpedition of 1832-42, wanted a comprehensivesurvey of everything, from languages and tribal divi-sions to the physical characteristics of the peoples ofthe various regions. Boas was often impatient withhis superior's demands, describing him as an "old man[who] knows nothing about general ethnology" (Cole1973:41).

Boas found ethnographic fieldwork in areas beyondthe coast a challenge. He had recorded the stories of asmall group of NIaka'pamux gathered at an Anglicanchurch at Lytton at the end of his second field seasonin the Northwest Coast (his first for the BAAS) in July1888. But he was not satisfied with these due to theheavy influence of Christian missionaries. After Lytton,he headed east to Windemere, just west of the RockyMountains where he encountered what he referred toas his first "real Indians" on account of their "red skin,eagle noses, the famous blanket, moccasins, rabbit [?]apron, and deerskin jacket, with hair hanging loose or

braided, more than six feet long" (F. Boas to M. Boas,18July 1888, Rohner 1 969:1 02). Here too he expresseddisappointment. Although he collected a fair numberof stories and vocabularies there, he found it difficultto find suitable "informants." He also found little com-mon ground with his coastal work. As he explained tohis wife: "I am not so very much interested in thesetribes, because they have very little relation to all myformer work.... The language is very unfamiliar to meand the interpreter does not understand well enoughto make it worthwhile to stay another week" (F. Boasto M. Boas, 18 July 1888, Rohner 1969:102).

Boas tried again the following summer of 1889 towork with peoples of the interior, but this proved tobe even more disappointing than his earlier efforts. Ashe noted in a letter to his wife, "The last two weekswere not very fruitful. To my great distress a LillooetIndian who had promised me the evenings has goneagain and I had wanted to learn something about theirlanguage" (F. Boas to M. Boas, 14 September 1889,Rohner 1969:1 14). His lack of success with these for-ays into the interior regions of the province may ac-count for his decision to spend the entire 1890 and1891 field seasons on the coast.

It was not until his sixth field trip in September1 894, that Boas ventured again into the interior re-gion. This time he decided to focus on the Okanaganregion, with stops also at Glacier, Enderby, Sicamousand Kamloops. Again, his results were meager. "MyOkanagan trip was a great failure," he complained tohis wife in a letter dated September 16, 1894:

Friday I went with an Indian to LakeOkanagan in pouring rain to measure Indians.Unfortunately he took me to the chief firstinstead of letting me go from house tohouse. We had to parley a lot, and then thechief told me to wait, that he was going totalk it over in the evening. From the way heacted I could tell that the good chief wasafraid and that I wouldn't get what I wanted.When all the Indians had scattered in alldirections in the evening, I left, arriving inEnderby very late and very angry. I was so coldthat I could not move my fingers.... Well, therewas nothing I could do about it. .. . Yesterday

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PARTICIPANTS/ JAMES A. TEIT

I got five people in Enderby. I met a mission-ary there who had come from the Lake. Igreeted him politely, he asked me what Iwas doing, and I explained everything to himas well as I could. He answered very politely(he is French), 'That seems very foolish. Whatdo you want to do such nonsense for?' TheIndians ask his advice, which he freely gives.And that is the reason for my lack of successin Enderby. I will be glad when I am back onthe coast again! (F. Boas to M. Boas, 16September 1894, Rohner 1969:136).

Not surprisingly, when Boas arrived at Spences Bridgetwo days later, he was beginning to lose faith in hisabilities as a fieldworker. Teit's willingness to assisthim did much to lift his spirits. On the first day of theirmeeting, Teit convinced his relatives and friends tosubmit themselves to Boas' anthropometric measure-ments; on the second day Teit saddled two horsesand took Boas to visit numerous aboriginal settlementsin the vicinity of Spences Bridge.

Immediately Boas' attitude to his fieldworkchanged. "The disagreeable feeling I had that I don'tget along with the Indians is slowly wearing off now,"he wrote to his wife, "and I am hopeful that I will havegood results" (F. Boas to M. Boas, 21 September 1894,Rohner 1 969:1 39). By the end of the visit, he noted, "Iam slowly getting into the mood of'fieldwork' again"(F. Boas to M. Boas, 23 September 1894, Rohner1969:142).

Before departing for New York in December, Boasmade a return trip to Spences Bridge to continue hiswork with Teit who had arranged a trip to a number ofoutlying aboriginal communities: Lytton, Stain [Stein],and North Bend. Boas was pleased, especially with hissuccess at measuring "one hundred and twenty-threeIndians" in just three days (F. Boas to M. Boas, 1 5December 1894, Rohner 1969:195).

There were many rich ethnographic experienceson this trip, such as one at Stain, at the confluence ofthe Thompson and Eraser Rivers where a chief regaledBoas and Teit with speeches in the company of nu-merous onlookers (F. Boas to M. Boas, 1 5 December1894, Rohner 1 969:196). Boas was particularly pleased

to find that Teit was already well along on an ethno-graphic report on the NIaka'pamux that he had pro-posed the previous September (F. Boas to M. Boas, 1 5December 1894, Rohner 1969:196).

A Year of Continuous Work

During the first year of their collaboration, Teit provedto be an ideal ethnographic assistant for Boas. Heworked diligently to answer the latter's queries aboutthe languages and traditions of the interior cultures. Byearly spring 1895, he had completed a 216-page re-port on the NIaka'pamux, noting that this did not inany way exhaust his knowledge of the topic: "There isno subject which [sic] I have taken up in the paper, butwhat I could have treated more fully if I had wantedto, especially as this [is] the case with beliefs and cus-toms, many of which I have never made mention [of]at all in the paper" (Teit to Boas, 22 February 1895,AMNH-BTC).

One of Boas' early requests of Teit was to find outwhat existed about the "Stuwixamux," an Athapaskan-speaking group that was once resident in the NicolaValley. Teit tracked down three elderly men knowl-edgeable about this little-known group and wrote anaccount, which Boas included in his "Report of the65th Meeting of the British Association for the Ad-vancement of Science" (Boas 1 895). By the spring of1895, Teit had also assembled a large collection of"articles of ethnological value" (buckskin leggings, ashirt, moccasins, beaver-teeth dice, gambling sticks, astone axe, a tent mat, two root-diggers, a fire drill, anda stone hammer), which he mailed to Boas in NewYork (Teit to Boas, 1 2 March 1 895, AMNH-BTC).

By August 1895, Teit felt sufficiently comfortablewith Boas to begin offering the latter critical feedback."I thank you very much for the copy [of the Sixth Re-port on the Northwest Tribes of Canada] you sent,"wrote Teit to Boas, "and have looked over it with muchpleasure and profit. You have made a few slight mis-takes in your vocabulary of the Ntlakyapamux. I willsend you a list sometime of these when I have more

W. WICKWIRE

1 2 5

time and also the words and compound forms whichyou seem to have been unable to obtain" (Teit to Boas,1 2 August 1 895, AMNH-BTC). Teit also challenged Boason some of his conclusions regarding interior people:

I consider it very surprising that you shouldfind four, I might say five, such remarkablydifferent types of Indian [sic] in the rathersmall area of BC. If you investigate theLillooet next summer you will I am sure findthat they are different from theNLakyapamuxoe and the NkamtcinEmuxperhaps resembling the Harrison Lake type,or perhaps somewhat different. You will alsofind if you go into that field that the averageCarrier and average Chilcotin are not alike atleast in countenance or features and instature. The only mistakes which I notice inlooking over your sheets of measurementsare on sheet 10 (Teit to Boas, 22 October1895, AMNH-BTC).

Teit's Role in the Jesup North PacificExpedition

In June 1897, Boas returned to British Columbia to fin-ish his work for the BAAS and to initiate the first phaseof his own field project funded by Morris K. Jesup, Presi-dent of the Board of Trustees of the American Mu-seum of Natural History. The goal of the Jesup NorthPacific Expedition was to conduct a systematic eth-nological and archaeological investigation of the re-lations among the indigenous peoples of the NorthPacific Rim—Northwestern America and Northeast-ern Asia. Field parties would work in stages over afive-year period on the American west coast, alongthe coast of the Sea of Okhotsk, and in the northernportion of the Bering Sea. Boas saw this project asan opportunity to pursue a more historical approach.In his words: "A detailed study of customs in theirrelation to the total culture of the tribe practicingthem, in connection with an investigation of theirgeographical distribution among neighboring tribes,affords us almost always a means of determiningwith considerable accuracy the historical causes thatled to the formation of the customs in question andto the psychological processes that were at work

1 26

in their development" (Boas 1896, quoted in Cole2001:32-3).

Boas sought out primary materials of all sorts, butespecially texts recorded in the Native languages(retellings of myths, dreams, ideas, etc.), which heconsidered to be the best source of accurate andauthentic ethnographic data (Berman 1996:220).Since few First Nation peoples in the Pacific North-west were fluent in English at this time, however, suchtexts were difficult to elicit by non-linguists. Boas' fineear for languages enabled him to proceed quickly. Buthe could not undertake the task of such large-scaleethnographic and linguistic recording and mappingalone. He therefore organized his Jesup Expeditionaround teams of ethnographers. For its first field sea-son in the Pacific Northwest, he appointed Harlan I.Smith, assistant curator of the archaeology collectionsat the American Museum of Natural History, to under-take the archaeological component of the project. Boasalso brought along Livingston Farrand, a colleague inpsychology from Columbia University, to assist withthe general ethnographic field research. The only prob-lem here was that neither Smith nor Farrand had hadany previous field experience in this region. In fact,Farrand was a complete novice, having had no previ-ous ethnographic field experience in Aboriginal NorthAmerica. He had joined this expedition at his ownexpense, in order to gain some field experience underBoas' tutelage.

To overcome the linguistic and cultural limitationsof his co-workers, Boas appointed Teit. The latter'sfluency in the NIaka'pamux language and two years offield research under his close supervision qualified himwell to work on the JNPE project. As Boas explained inhis first Jesup Expedition report, Teit had begun hisJesup research even before the arrival of the expedi-tion team in British Columbia (Boas 1898a). Boas alsodesignated Spences Bridge to be the initial site for hisJesup research in North America. He had outlined inletters how he wanted Teit to prepare for his visit. Teithad responded accordingly: "I have been preparing

PARTICIPANTS/ JAMES A. TEIT

the Indians here for your taking their pictures. If youbring a camera I think you will have no trouble gettinga lot of both men and women" (Teit to Boas, 10 March1897, AMNH-BTC). Teit also prepared his friends andneighbors for the plaster casting process that Boasplanned to use to document human facial features. Henoted that without such preparation most would bereluctant to participate (Thom 2001:141).

Boas' goal was to travel by way of the CaribooWagon Road from Spences Bridge to Bella Coola. Aseasoned horse-packer, Teit planned this trip carefully,even advising Boas that he and his colleagues wouldneed to bring little with them: "Regarding the camp-ing outfit required," wrote Teit in April 1897, "you willnot need to buy any of it. I will furnish it all. All youhave to bring will be your blankets and any other thingyou may wish in that line. Also anything you think bestas a protection against mosquitoes and flies whichare bad in some parts of the country through whichwe will pass" (Jeit to Boas, 29 April 1 897, AMNH-BTC;Fig. 45). Due to Teit's careful planning, the New York-based research team was able to launch into its workimmediately on arriving at Spences Bridge. As Boasnoted after measuring and photographing people andcollecting ethnographic objects: "It was not much ef-fort ... Teit had prepared everything for us very well.The Indians were ready for us promptly yesterday af-ternoon, and we could not work quickly enough tofinish with all of them" (F. Boas to M. Boas, 5 June 1 897,Rohner 1969:202).

The party of four worked incessantly on a varietyof projects, from plaster casting, photography and re-cording songs: "We can be satisfied with the results ofour first two days here. If it only will continue this way!"(F. Boas to M. Boas, 5 June 1897, Rohner 1969:202).And it did continue. At the end of the third day. Boaswrote to his wife:

We seem to be finished here with thecastings. I let Farrand and Smith make thecasts ready for shipping. This afternoonJimmy Teit and i went down to the village

and collected melodies. The phonographworks very well, and we got ten goodsongs.... I can really be satisfied with my firstfew days here. We got eleven casts andmany photos, a few measurements and threesongs (Franz Boas, 5 June 1897, Rohner1969:202).

Boas also noted that he had obtained explanations ofthe various designs on woven baskets, jewelry, andmasks (F. Boas to M. Boas, 14 June 1897, Rohner1969:205). In addition to helping Boas and Farrand,Teit also made time to acquaint Smith with some ofthe archaeological sites along the banks of the Th-ompson River. Boas could not have wished for a moreproductive beginning to his Jesup Expedition.

On June 14, Boas, Farrand, and Teit headed northto the central interior, leaving Smith behind to con-tinue his archaeological work at Spences Bridge,Kamloops, and Lytton. Because Teit had organized ev-erything, including four riding horses, five pack horses,and three guides, who traveled behind on foot. Boasand Farrand had little to do but to follow Teit. Thetravel was slow, however, and Boas expressed frustra-tion in his letters about the monotony of the trip. Hewas particularly concerned about the time required topack and unpack the horses. He was also disappointedto find most of the aboriginal villages along the wayto be completely deserted. He commented repeat-edly that people had "scattered" in all directions. Thiswas late spring, a time when women traveled to theirfavorite berry-picking and root-digging areas. Men mayhave accompanied them to catch fresh fish or meat. "Iwill be very glad when we finally reach the coast," hewrote to his wife. "I am fed up with these trips into thewilderness" (F. Boas to M. Boas, 6 July 1897, Rohner1969:208). At Puntzi Lake, on the Chilcotin plateau,the party dropped Farrand to undertake a month-longfield study of language and oral narrative traditions.Meanwhile Boas continued with Teit onto Bella Coolawhere he had arranged to work with George Hunt.The son of an English Hudson's Bay Company employeeand a high-ranking Tlingit woman. Hunt had grown upamong, and married into, the Fort Rupert

W. WICKWIRE

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Kwakwaka'wakw. Boas met him in 1886. Later hecomissioned him to mount an artifact exhibit and or-ganize a performing group for the World's ColumbianExposition in Chicago in 1893 (Cole 1985: 122-40;Berman 1996).

After seven weeks of slow horse travel, Boas andhis party arrived at Bella Coola on 20 July 1897. Teitand the guides remained there for three days beforebeginning the return trip to Spences Bridge. They car-ried with them the plaster casts and artifacts the grouphad collected on the trip north. While Boas workedwith Hunt at Bella Coola and later at Rivers Inlet, andwith Charles Edenshaw at Port Essington, Teit contin-ued the ethnographic work in the more southerly re-gions that he had been doing prior to Boas' arrival:collecting myths, working on the language, and revis-ing his NIaka'pamux ethnographic report.

Boas returned to New York in late September 1897and wasted no time booking Teit for further ethno-graphic fieldwork. With the Upper NIaka'pamux researchwell underway. Boas was eager for Teit to begin docu-menting adjacent groups—the Lower Thompson andthe Lillooet. Teit agreed to do this, reporting to Boasby April 1898 that he had completed two weeks offield research at Spuzzum, which included collectingthirty-one myths and a range of artifacts: a stone pipe,two stone hammers, and a copper spek (Teit to Boas,6 April 1898, AMNH-BTC). By September 1898, Teithad completed another two months of fieldworkamong the Lillooet (Teit to Boas, 28 August 1898,AMNH-BTC). Although this was his first field researchbeyond his home community, it went well: "I foundthe Lillooets to be a very fine people—the mosttractable and kindest I was ever amongst. I had nodifficulty with them in any way. The Pembertonpeople especially were very good" (Teit to Boas, 8October 1898, AMNH-BTC). "My notes on customsalone," he wrote to Boas, "fill 122 pages and I havealso gathered many stories." He brought home about110 artifacts, the majority of which were baskets, anda large collection of myths. After spending the fall writ-

ing up his Lower Thompson report (Teit to Boas, 1 1November 1898, AMNH, BTC), Teit returned to Lillooetcountry again, reporting to Boas in July 1 899 that thisfield research had also gone well (Teit to Boas, 1 2 July1899, AMNH-BTC). In addition to seventeen artifacts,including some very fine baskets, he had collectedmore oral narratives, bringing his total number of Lillooetstories to sixty (Teit to Boas, 19 July 1899, AMNH-BTQ.

Early in the year 1 900, with The Thompson Indians 'mpress (Teit 1900), Boas urged Teit to write up his Lillooetfield notes: "What are you doing with your Lillooetmaterial? Do you expect to find time soon to send meyour notes?" (Boas to Teit, 7 February 1900, AMNH-BTC). Teit replied a week later that he would send him"some (perhaps all) this spring" (Teit to Boas, 16 Febru-ary 1900, AMNH-BTC). Boas was now so delightedwith Teit that he proposed a five-year research plan:

I should like to suggest to you to commencesystematic work in this line by writing downtexts in the Indian language with interlineartranslation, and putting down at the sametime material for a dictionary. It is best toselect for the texts, on the one hand tradi-tional material, such as myths, and on theother hand material in the form of conversa-tions or speeches, because the grammaticalforms that occur in the latter are, on thewhole quite different from those found in theformer. I hope you will be willing to under-take this work, and I believe I shall be able toset aside a certain amount of money tocompensate you for the time that youdevote to this matter. I think if you couldcontinue work of this kind for four or fiveyears, we shall be able to obtain a very fulldictionary and grammar of the Thompsonlanguage (Boas to Teit, 27 January 1900,AMNH-BTC).

In July 1900, Boas made his second and final field tripto the Northwest Coast under the auspices of the JesupExpedition. As he had done in 1897, Boas started outat Spences Bridge where he spent a week workingwith Teit prior to heading to Alert Bay to work withWilliam Brotchie, George Hunt, and others.

After Boas' departure, Teit undertook two monthsof field research in August and September 1900 among

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PARTICIPANTS/ JAMES A. TEIT

the Shuswap and Chilcotin: "I have now interviewedold men belonging to High Bar, Big Bar, Canoe Creek,Dog Creek, and Alkali Lake," he wrote to Boas (Teit toBoas, 20 September 1900, AMNH-BTC). "I had one manliving with me for three weeks under wages, andpumped him until he got tired." Teit was pleased withhis results: "I think I have obtained the great majorityor nearly all the stories remembered by the Fraser RiverShuswap" (Teit to Boas, 21 October 1 900, AMNH-BTC).By November, he had crated and mailed to Boas someseventy items gathered during this trip (Teit to Boas,1 5 November 1900, AMNH-BTC). Meanwhile, he con-tinued his work on his Lillooet report for the JNPE seriesnoting that, "I am writing the whole out in chapters inthe same way as you grouped my paper on theThompsons." He worked hard on this: "As I am writingsteady every night I expect to be able to send you thewhole paper before very long. As soon as I have fin-ished it, I will commence to write out the Shuswapmyths" (Teit to Boas, 23 November 1 900, AMNH-BTC).Teit hoped to get to the more westerly bands of theShuswap the following summer: "I think it will be awise thing if you can see your way clear to send me asearly as possible next summer to the Shuswaps ofCanim Lake, Upper North Thompson and Shuswap Lake.. . . If this were done I would be able to write out apaper on the whole Shuswap tribe in the same way asthe Lillooet and Thompsons have been dealt with" (Teitto Boas, 23 November 1900, AMNH-BTC). Finally, earlyin the year ] 901, Teit sent Boas the last chapters of hisLillooet report (Teit to Boas, 26 February 1 901, AMNH-ETQ.

After a six month trip to the Shetlands in 1902,Teit resumed his work for Boas: "I am going up Nicolaon the fourteenth to collect myths there," he wrote toBoas in July 1 902, "and I expect it will take me until theend of the month" (Teit to Boas, 1 2 July 1902, AMNH-BTC). Later, he noted that he would be willing to go tothe coast to work among the Lower Fraser people."Please give me full directions for the carrying out ofsame" (Teit to Boas, 19 November 1902, AMNH-BTC).

By mid-March 1903, Teit had completed this work.

Perhaps due to the success of the field researchundertaken by Teit and Hunt, Boas decided against afield trip in 1903. As he explained to Teit: "I am sorryto say that I shall not be able to go out West thissummer. I have not had time so far to work out thematerial that I collected three years ago, and so I thinkit better to stay here and finish that work. I shall send$400 for your Shuswap work within a few days. I amlooking forward to your next shipment" (Boas to Teit,1 April 1903, AMNH-BTC). Just one month later. Boasoutlined to Teit a five-year research plan:

I wish you would take the time before youstart to think over the further developmentof your work on the Shuswap, and also theextension of your work on the Okanogon[sic] and the Salish tribes of Washington. Ishould like very much to be able to continueyour work in the whole region, which youknow so well, and to push it a little morerapidly than we have been doing these lastfew years. Could you not make someestimate, say, for a period of about fiveyears, including in such an estimate theexpenses for fieldwork during such periodand a salary for yourself. I should like to seeincluded in this work also the recording oftexts in the Thompson language aboutwhich we have so often spoken. My ideawould be that you should begin to writethese texts down, and that after you havemade a considerable collection, I shouldcome out, and that we should spend to-gether some time with the Indians, gettingreally thorough information on the grammarof the language (Boas to Teit, 5 May 1903,AMNH-BTC).

Teit responded that he needed financial compensa-tion to do this: "I am quite willing to devote more ofmy own time to it (the southern tribes), if you couldmanage and afford to give me sufficient remunerationso I could be able to give up some other lines of workI at present partly depend on' (Teit to Boas, 14 June1903, AMNH-BTC). Teit estimated that he would need$850 to cover five years of research at eight monthsper year.

By the end of the summer of 1903, Teit reportedto Boas that he had "visited all the Shuswaps and their

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villages excepting the Spallumcheen and, of course,the Kootenai band. I got some additional informationand cleared up some points, but on the whole I didnot add much to the information I obtained from theFraser River Shuswaps two or three years ago" (Teit toBoas, 24 August 1903, AMNH-BTC).

With his Shuswap report well under way by thefollowing spring, Teit began to make plans for furtherwork among the Okanagan. "Personally I feel muchinterested in the work," he wrote to Boas, "and will tryto take an elderly man with me from this region, whois well acquainted with the Southern dialects, and in-terested in old things" (Teit to Boas, 25 May 1904,AMNH-BTC). "I think I will make a trip there this summerleaving in about two weeks time, and making theOkanagan River my objective point for this year. Go-ing, I will pass through Similkameen where I will prob-ably stay a short time, and returning I will visit OkanaganLake. I am not sure yet if I will cross the Boundary Linewith the pack train as there may be bother with thecustoms" (Teit to Boas, 1 3 May 1904, AMNH-BTC). Bythe middle of August, he had completed six weeks ofwork among the Okanagan (Teit to Boas, 12 August1904, AMNH-BTC).

Meanwhile Boas, by 1904, had spent only fivemonths in the field during thejesup Expedition. Hisproductive ethnographic exchange by mail with bothTeit and Hunt, and his faith in both field researchers towork largely on their own for months at a time hadeliminated the need for Boas to be on site. Smith andFarrand were similarly dependent on their mail corre-spondence with Teit to finalize their Jesup Expeditionreports (Teit to Smith, 4 December 1899, AMNH-BTC).

Boas had not been pleased with his own fieldworkduring the first Jesup season in 1897, mainly due toslow and awkward travel through the inland regions.And Farrand's month at Puntzi Lake had resulted invery sparse results. Meanwhile, Teit, who dealt withslow and awkward travel on a daily basis, had gen-erated a rich ethnographic database. He had alsobecome a sensitive and sophisticated fieldworker

who could negotiate easily between the world ofhis interviewees and that of his distant employers.For example, on the basis of unacceptable protocol,he refused to comply with the AMNH's request forsigned receipts from aboriginal interviewees:

To them 'touching the pen' is a very seriousand solemn matter requiring much delibera-tion, and explanation, as for instance whenthey make an argument with the Govern-ment, or with some big tyhee about someimportant matter. It is also very unhandy forexample in open camps, in all kinds ofweather (raining or blowing) or perhapspested with mosquitoes, or blinded withsmoke, to get the Indian to mark a voucherfor some little specimen I have purchasedfrom him. Understanding the Indian mindabout the thing as I do, it seems to me in thenature of a joke. I know it is business, but upto date New York City methods do notalways work out in the wilds of B. C. Anyway it is no check on me, for it would beeasy for me to put crosses and Indian nameson any amount of them, and no one wouldknow whether they are genuine or not.Signatures are different, but not one Indian in200 can sign his name. Even amongst theWhites it is not the style here (in smallmatters) when say you get a meal (as I maysometimes do when on a trip) to ask thewaitress to sign a voucher for it (Teit to Boas,10 March 1904, AMNH-BTC).

Teit's Place in the Publication Record ofthe Jesup North Pacific Expedition

Of the twenty-seven publications under the AMNHJesup North Pacific Expedition series, Teit authored four:The Thompson Indians {] 900), The Lillooet{] 906), TheShuswap {] 909), and Mythology of the Thompson Indians(1912). He was a major contributor to four others, act-ing as a field assistant (identifying sites, collecting arti-facts) and consultant to Harlan Smith for the latter'sArchaeology of Lytton (1899) and Archaeology of theThompson River {] 900a); facilitating the photographicwork that formed the core of the Expedition's Ethno-graphical Album of the North Pacific Coasts of Americaand Asia (Boas 1900); and providing the bulk of theprimary data featured in Livingston Farrand's BasketryDesigns of the Salish Indians {] 900). In comparison. Boas'

1 30

PARTICIPANTS/ JAMES A. TEIT

written contributions were substantially smaller, con-sisting of five JNPE publications, of which three (Boasand Hunt 1905, 1906; Boas 1909) drew heavily onthe research of George Hunt, and two (Boas 1898b,1898c) drew on data provided by Charles Edenshaw,a Haida artist at Port Essington, and an unidentifiedstoryteller at Bella Coola. Teit's monographs on theThompson, Lillooet, and Shuswap, were also the onlyfull ethnographic overviews ("basic ethnographies") ofthe individual aboriginal groups completed for theNorthwest Coast segment of the JNPE and publishedunder the Expedition's series.

Conclusion

Thejesup North Pacific Expedition was one of the greatexpeditions of American anthropology (Fitzhugh andCrowell 1988:14). Historian Douglas Cole described itas "the most cherished" of Boas' museum projects. Itwas, he notes, "the showpiece of Boas' associationwith the American Museum of Natural History" (Cole2001:29). For Boas it was also important for estab-lishing American anthropology as a field-based disci-pline. It is ironic, therefore, that other than two shortfield trips to the Northwest Coast in 1897 and 1900,the JNPE marked the end of Boas' longterm fieldtrips.After the JNPE, his fieldwork consisted of a small ar-chaeological study in the American Southwest, fol-lowed by two short trips to British Columbia in 1914and 1923 and a longer one in 1930. In fact, the JNPEhelped establish Boas as a supervisor of distant teamsof resident fieldworkers. The key members of the Brit-ish Columbia field team were Teit and Hunt, who sub-mitted their results regularly to Boas by mail. Boas' de-cision to move away from on-site field research maybe a consequence of the problems he encounteredduring his 1897 field season, especially the inconve-nience and expense of cumbersome travel through theinland areas of British Columbia. Shortly after the JNPE,he concluded that ethnography produced by observ-ers who had command of the language and who werefriends with the Native peoples was of a higher quality

W. WICKWIRE

than that of the scholarly types "who had to workthrough an interpreter" (jacknis 1 996:221).

Clearly Boas had Teit and Hunt in mind when hemade this statement, as by the end of the Jesup Expe-dition, he had secured both as long-term, dedicatedassistants. In the case of Hunt and the ethnography ofthe Coastal region, Boas could claim some credit as aco-fieldworker. But Teit's case was different. AlthoughBoas had tried to do fieldwork in the Interior regions,he never managed to accomplish anything close towhat he had accomplished on the Coast. Indeed, with-out Teit, the JNPE ethnographic record for the interiorregions would have been weak. For this reason, Teitdeserves to be recognized today as more than a"JNPE informant" or a "Boas' research assistant," butrather as a full and productive JNPE team-member whomade a lasting contribution to the anthropology ofaboriginal North America.

Acknowledgements

First, I would like to thank Igor Krupnik and Laurel Kendallfor planning this special volume and working so dili-gently with us to bring it to completion. I am espe-cially grateful to Sigurd Teit, who supported my workon his father with such enthusiasm and generosity overthe years. In particular, I would like to thank Sigurd fordonating the photographs of his father, James Teit, andof the historical Spences Bridge community that ap-pear in this essay. Special thanks to my workstudystudent assistant, Quinn Dupont for his work on thephotographs that appear in this essay. I also extendmy thanks to the British Columbia Provincial Archivesin Victoria, BC, the Kamloops Museum, Kamloops, BC,and the American Museum of Natural History in NewYork for allowing me to reproduce photographs fromtheir collections.

Notes

1. Anthropologist Ronald Rohner's referenceto Teit as "one of Boas' principal informants"(Rohner 1966:183) is typical.

1 3 1

2. Anthropologist Roderick Sprague has ar-gued similarly that Teit's contribution to the studyof Plateau ethnology, folklore, linguistics, andethnographic analogy in archaeology has oftenbeen "overlooked by researchers in that culturearea" (Sprague 1991:103).

3. James changed his surname from Tait toTeit on arriving in Canada (Sigurd Teit, personalcommunication).

4. Many names have been applied to the "In-terior Salishan" peoples who occupy the southcentral interior of British Columbia. In the earlypublished ethnographic record, they were calledthe "Thompson," the "Okanagan," the "Shuswap,"and the "Lillooet." In recent years, these anglicizednames have been replaced by the indigenousnames, spelled variously: "NIaka'pamux," "Sec-wepemc," and "Sta'atl'imx." "Okanagan" has re-mained the same. Throughout this paper the termsare used interchangeably.

5. For fuller biographical details on Teit, seePat Lean and Sigurd Teit (1 995:3-60) and Wickwire(1993, 1998, 2002). There is some difference ofopinion regarding Teit's early residency in BritishColumbia. According to Peter Campbell (1 994:38),Teit spent time from 1 887 until 1 892 in Nanaimoworking in the coal mines. Teit's son, Sigurd Teit,however, reports that his father spent only twoweeks in the Nanaimo coal mines (Sigurd Teit,personal communication 1989).

ReferencesBerman, Judith

1 996 "The Culture as It Appears to the Indian Him-self: Boas, George Hunt, and the Methods of Eth-nography. In Volksgeist as Method and Ethic: Essayson Boasian Ethnography and the German Anthropologi-cal Tradition. George W. Stocking,Jr., ed. Pp. 21 5-56.History of Anthropology, 8. Madison: University ofWisconsin Press.

Boas, Franz

1 895 TheTinnehTribesof Nicola Valley. In TheNorth-Western Tribes of Canada—J 0th Report of the Com-mittee. Report of the Sixty-Fifth Meeting of the Brit-ish Association for the Advancement of Science, vol.8, pp. 295-7.

1 896 The Limitations of the Comparative Methodof Anthropology. Science, n.s. 4:901-08.

1 898a Thejesup North Pacific Expedition. TheJesup NorthPacific Expedition, vol.1, pt.l, pp. 1-1 2. Memoirs of

the American Museum of Natural History, vol. 2. NewYork: G.E. Stechert.

1 898b Facial Paintings of the Indians of NorthernBritish Columbia. The Jesup North Pacific Expedi-tion, vol.1, pt. 2, pp. 1 3-24. Memoirs of the Ameri-can Museum of Natural History, vol. 2. New York:G.E. Stechert.

1 898c The Mythology of the Bella Coola Indians. TheJesup North Pacific Expedition, vol.1, pt. 2, pp. 25-127. Memoirs of the American Museum of NaturalHistory, vol. 2. New York: C. E. Stechert.

1 900 Ethnographical Album of the North Pacific Coastsof America and Asia: Jesup North Pacific Expedition.New York: American Museum of Natural History.

1 909 The KwakiutI of Vancouver Island. The JesupNorth Pacific Expedition, vol. 5, pt. 2, pp. 301-522.Memoirs of the American Museum of Natural History8. Leiden: E.J. Brill; New York: G.E. Stechert.

Boas, Franz, and George Hunt

1 90 5 KwakiutI Texts. The Jesup North Pacific Expedi-tion, vol. 3. Memoirs of the American Museum of Natu-ral HistoryS. Leiden: E.J. Brill; New York: G.E. Stechert.

1 906 KwakiutI Texts (Second Series). The Jesup NorthPacific Expedition, vol. 10, pt. 1, pp. 1-269. Memoirsof the American Museum of Natural History 14. Leiden:E.J. Brill; New York: G.E. Stechert.

Campbell, Peter

1 994 Not as a Whiteman, not as a Sojourner: JamesA. Teit and the Fight for Native Rights in British Co-lumbia, 1884-1922. Left History 2(2):37-S7.

Cole, Douglas

1 973 The Origins of Canadian Anthropology. Jour-nal of Canadian Studies 7( 1): 3 3-4 5.

1985 Captured Heritage: The Scramble for NorthwestCoast Artifacts. Vancouver: Douglas and Mclntyre.

2001 "The Greatest Thing Undertaken by any Mu-seum": Franz Boas, Morris Jesup, and the North Pa-cific Expedition. In Gateways. Exploring the Legacy ofthe Jesup North Pacific Expedition. Igor Krupnik andWilliam W. Fitzhugh, eds. Pp. 29-70. Contributionsto Circumpolar Anthropology 1. Washington, DC:Arctic Studies Center.

Farrand, Livingston

1 900 Basketry Designs of the Salish Indians. The JesupNorth Pacific Expedition, vol. 1, pt.5, Pp.393-99. Mem-oirs of the American Museum of Natural History, 2.New York: G.E. Stechert.

Farrand, Livingston, and W.S. Kahnweiler

1 902 Traditions oftheQuinault Indians. The JesupNorthPacific Expedition, vol.1, pt.3, pp.77-1 32. Memoirsof the American Museum of Natural History!. NewYork: G.E. Stechert.

Fitzhugh, William, and Aron Crowell, eds.

1988 Crossroads of Continents: Cultures of Siberia andAlaska. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution.

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Jacknis, Ira

1 996 The Ethnographic Object and the Object ofEthnology in the Early Career of Franz Boas. In Volks-geist as Method and Ethic: Essays on Boasian Ethnog-raphy and the German Anthropological Tradition.George W. Stocking, Jr., ed. Pp. 185-214. Historyof Anthropology, 8. Madison: University of Wis-consin Press.

Lean, Pat, and Sigurd Teit

1 995 Introduction. In Teit Times 1 (Summer):3-5.

Rohner, Ronald

1 966 Franz Boas: Ethnographer on the NorthwestCoast. In Pioneers of American Anthropology. June Helm,ed. Pp. 149-222. Monograph of the American Eth-nological Society 43. Seattle: University of Washing-ton Press.

Rohner, Ronald, ed.

1 969 The Ethnography of Franz Boas: Letters andDiaries of Franz Boas Written on the NorthwestCoast from 1886 to 1931. Chicago: University ofChicago Press.

Smith, Harlan I.

1 899 Archaeology of Lytton, British Columbia. TheJesup North Pacific Expedition, vol.1, pt.3, pp. 129-61. Memoirs of the American Museum of Natural His-tory, 2. New York: C.E Stechert.

1 900a Archaeology of the Thompson River Region,British Columbia. The Jesup North Pacific Expedition,vol.1, pt. 6, pp. 401-42. Memoirs of the AmericanMuseum of Natural History, 2. New York: G. E.Stechert.

Sprague, Roderick

1 991 A Bibliography of James A. Teit. Northwest

Anthropological Research Notes 21 (1): 103-1 5.Teit, James A.

1 900 The Thompson Indians of British Columbia. The

Jesup North Pacific Expedition, vol. 1, pt. 4, pp. 1 63-392. Memoirs of the American Museum of NaturalHistory, 2. New York: C.E. Stechert.1 906 The Lillooet Indians. The Jesup North PacificExpedition, vol. 2, pt.5, pp. 192-300. Memoirs of theAmerican Museum of Natural History, 4. New York:C.E. Stechert.

1 909 The Shuswap. The Jesup North Pacific Expedition,vol.2, pt. 7, pp. 443-81 3. Memoirs of the AmericanMuseum of Natural History, 4. E.J. Brill: Leiden; NewYork: C.E. Stechert.

1912 Mythology of the Thompson Indians. The JesupNorth Pacific Expedition, vol.8, pt. 2, pp. 199-416.Memoirs of the American Museum of Natural History,1 2. E.J. Brill: Leiden; New York: C.E. Stechert.

The Shetland Times

1 904 Obituary: Death of Mr. John Tait, Merchant,

Lerwick. The Shetland Times, 24 December.Thom, Brian

2001 Harlan I. Smith's Jesup Fieldwork on the North-west Coast. In Gateways. Exploring the Legacy of theJesup North Pacific Expedition, 1897-] 902. IgorKrupnik and William W. Fitzhugh, eds. Pp. 1 39-81.Contributions to Circumpolar Anthropology 1. Wash-ington, DC: Arctic Studies Center.

Wickwire, Wendy

1 993 Women in Ethnography: The Research of James

A.Teit. Ethnohistory40{4y.539-62.1 998 We Shall Drink from the Stream and So Shall

You: James A. Teit and Native Resistance in British

Columbia, 1908-22. Canadian Historical Review

79(2): 199-236.

2002 'The Grizzly Cave Them the Song:" James Teitand Franz Boas Interpret Twin Ritual in AboriginalBritish Columbia, 1897-1 920. American Indian Quar-terly 25 {3):43]-52.

W. WICKWIRE

rranz boas and an "anf.nisKed Jesup" on

in Island: ^hedciins^ (\Jew on ^erthoid [ aufer

and ^ronislaw f^ilsudski

KOICHI INOUE

Sakhalin Island, which was inhabited by three groupsof the North Pacific indigenous people—the Paleo-Asiatic Nivkh (Cilyak), Tungusic Uilta (Orok), and theAinu—was included in the original fieldwork and op-erational plan of the Jesup North Pacific Expedition (JNPE)at a very early stage (cf. Boas 1905:92,99). However,none of the Sakhalin Native nations were representedin the subsequent JNPE publications, except for theNivkh featured in a special monograph contributed byLev (Leo) Shternberg. His monograph entitled "TheSocial Organization of the Gilyak," however, was notpublished with other volumes under the main JNPEpublication series nor in any related contemporaryproceedings. For several reasons, it remained in a manu-script form for several decades, until its recent publica-tion by the American Museum of Natural History in1999 (Shternberg 1999; Grant 1999; Kan 2001).

The first section of this paper reviews and assessesthe "unfinished" fieldwork conducted on Sakhalin Is-land within the framework of JNPE in 1898-9. The sec-ond section deals with Franz Boas' presumed concernsabout the quality of the JNPE Sakhalin data and hisdesire to expand the study of Sakhalin indigenouspeople. The latter was clearly demonstrated throughBoas' post-JNPE relationship with two Sakhalin-focusedscholars: Leo (Lev) Shternberg and Bronislaw Pilsudski.

Laufer's JNPE Fieldwork on Sakhalin

Berthold Laufer (1874-1934), a German orientalist, wasappointed by Boas in 1 897 as the first participant in

the JNPE Siberian operations (Boas 1903; Kendall 1 988;see also Cole 2001:36-7; Vakhtin 2001:75-6). Hav-ing just received his doctorate from the University ofLeipzig with a thesis on Tibetan texts, Laufer arrived inSakhalin via San Francisco, Vladivostok and Khabarovskon July 10, 1898. This started his field survey of theSakhalin Island and its Native people that lasted eightmonths—until March 21,1899.' During his eight-monthstay in Sakhalin, Laufer studied three local Native lan-guages, the Nivkh, Tungusic [Orok?], and Ainu, and vis-ited the northern, central, and southern sections of theisland (Freed et al. 1988a: 12-3; Kendall 1988:104).

From a preliminary published account of his field-work (Laufer 1900a), it appears that Laufer began hisSakhalin survey with visits to the Nivkh (Gilyak) villagesnear the mouths of the Tym and Nabyl Rivers and alongthe shore of the Sea of Okhotsk, in the present-dayNogliki District (rayon). These were the residences ofthe so-called "Tro-Gilyak" whose main villages wereMilk-vo, Nabyl-vo, Lun'-vo, Tyrmits, Nyi-vo, Chay-vo, andKaekr-vo (Laufer 1900a:31 5). Laufer laconically writes:"1 visited them [i.e., seven above mentioned villages—K.I.] in the summer of 1 898" (ibid).

It was probably on this first survey that Laufer alsopaid a brief visit to "the village of Wal" (today's Val—K.I.) and its vicinity, in expanding his ethnographic ex-ploration to the "Olcha" people. These were actuallynot the Olcha/Ulchi (who reside on the Siberian main-land, along the Amur River) but the Orok/Uilta, whostill comprise the core of the present-day residents of

1 3 5

the village of Val, about 50 km north of the easternSakhalin district center, the town of Nogliki. Laufercollected a number of valuable ethnographical speci-mens (see his brief description of amulets in: Laufer1 900a:326-7). He also observed a series of traditionalOrok funeral rites and ceremonies. In his brief publishedaccount (Laufer 1 900a:327-9), he presented a fairlyshort, though detailed information on certain Orok fu-neral practices, such as placing coffins on trees or onhigh wooden frames, and, in particular, about the fu-neral of a drowned hunter. By September 1898, Laufersent the following field report to Boas:

I have taken about [a] hundred[anthropometrical] measurements and carriedon investigations on the physical types andthe culture of those tribes [i.e. the Nivkh andOrok (Tungus)—K.I.], particularly regardingtheir decorative art, of that I have obtainedinteresting specimens together with goodexplanations, daily life, fishing and hunting,social organization, shamanism, medicineand so on; as to their healing methods, I gota very important collection of amulets...[forprotection] from diseases and representingthe figures of various animals [quoted from:Kendall 1988:104].

Laufer also recorded songs and folktales on wax cylin-ders by making use of the Edison phonograph. In March1899, he even requested from Boas "a small instantcamera" with the aim to secure visual documentationof what he observed in the field. In response, Boasrecommended that he hire a professional for fieldphotography. Laufer followed his recommendationpromptly.^

Judging from the aforementioned field reports, wemay assume that Laufer was, or at least tried to be,faithful to the initial fieldwork instructions given to himby Boas in 1 897, to write a "rounded" ethnography ofthe Sakhalin Native people. Meanwhile, Laufer's spe-cific and keen interest in the patterns of Native deco-rative art was already clearly manifested in his reports.

In early September 1 898, Laufer fell seriously illwith influenza and was obliged to attend to hishealth fortwo-and-a-half months (Laufer 1 899b:733).3

This two-and-a-half month time roughly correspondsto a period from September to mid-November, when,upon recovery from the influenza (and also pneumoniacontracted among the Cilyak—see Freed et al.,1988a: 1 3), Laufer resumed his field survey. He stoppedfirst for five days at the village of Rykovskoye [nowcalled Kirovskoye] where he observed a Nivkh bearfestival, and then proceeded southward on horseback,and reached the valley of the Poronay River (Laufer1899b:733). Here he arrived at the southern portionof the territory occupied by Uilta (Orok) people inSakhalin. Laufer summarized his trip as follows:

I visited the whole valley of the Poronai[Poronay River] as far as the mouth of theriver on a reindeer sledge, and stayed forsome time in the large Tungus village Muiko,where I had the great pleasure of obtainingadditional information in regard to the textswhich I had recorded during the precedingsummer. I have measured almost the wholepopulation of this area and collected statisti-cal information. ... In December I reachedTikhmenevsk [present-day city ofPoronaysk—K.I.], which is called Siska by thenatives.... On the following day I started on anexcursion eastward, in which I was particularlyfortunate and successful. I obtained manyspecimens and much information on theShamanistic rites and the ceremonials of thenatives (Laufer 1899b:733).

With regard to Laufer's Orok survey, we should payspecial attention to the fact that he not only collectedmuseum specimens, but also recorded sound informa-tion on wax cylinders and made ethnographic notes.Laufer's Sakhalin wax cylinders and field notes deserveserious investigation, if they can be found (see Keeling2001:280). Since we have Pilsudski's contemporarycomparable ethnographic and phonographic materi-als on the Orok (Pilsudski 1985, 1987, 1989), it wouldbe desirable to make a comparative analysis betweenthe two sets of documentation.

Although Laufer wrote: "There are a great manyerrors in Schrenck's descriptions of the tribes of Sag-halin"^ (Laufer 1899b:733), it was Laufer himself whomade an error when he said: "The Orok tribe, to which

1 36

PARTICIPANTS/ LAUFER AND PILSUDSKI

he [i.e., Schrenk—K.I.] refers, does not exist" [cf. Laufer1901:36], since the "Tungus", the "Olcha", or the "OlchaTungus" in Laufer's denomination were nothing but theOrok (Uilta) (cf. Demidova 1978:119).

The area of Taraika through which the Poronay Riverflows was also inhabited by the so-called Taraika Ainu.Laufer first met them on his visit to the villages of Taran-kotan and Taraika (present-day town of Ust'ye) locatedacross the river. He later visited the Orok villages of"[U]nu, Muiko and Walit, having passed the famous lakeof Taraika"^ (Laufer 1899b:734).

On December 31, Laufer returned to Siska and onJanuary 2, 1899, he

"[s]tarted by dog-sledge for Naiero [present-day town of Gastello—K.I.], where I had thebest results in my work with the Ainu. Then Ivisited all the settlements on the [east] coastas far as Naibuchi, which is 260 versts fromSiska. This journey was exceedingly difficult,and sometimes even dangerous" [ibid].

In fact, Laufer encountered numerous difficulties dur-ing his fieldwork among the Ainu. First, a winter dog-sled trip along the coast-line was physically verytrying, and Laufer experienced a near drowning in icywater when his sledge broke through the thin ice (Laufer1899b:734; Kendall 1988:104). Second, he sufferedfrom the lack of an operational language, since Rus-sian was entirely unknown among the Ainu. Laufer wasforced to make full use of his knowledge of the Japa-nese language, with which, however, the Sakhalin Ainuwere barely familiar at that time (Laufer 1899b:732).Third, and probably the most serious, gaps in commu-nication and shortage of time (even though he spentalmost a month on that trip), resulted in Laufer's inabil-ity to gain the confidence of the local Ainu. That wasobvious from his very poor data on physical anthro-pology, since he did not succeed in obtaining anyanthropometrical measurements among the Ainu, ex-cept for a single "man of imposing stature" in Korsakov.Laufer attributed his failure to the extreme supersti-tions of the Ainu (Laufer 1899b:733).

K. INOUE

Some comments to Laufer's trouble and methodshe used were noted in a letter to Leo (Lev) Shternbergwritten in 1903 by Bronislaw Pilsudski:

Several days ago I heard that he [i.e., Laufer—K.I.] had taken measurements of eight Ainupeople in Korsakov and paid to each one byten bottles of spirits. I don't intend, ofcourse, to give either spirits or such amountof money that may be equal to the [price of|spirits, and the question is, whether I will beable to obtain those [Ainu] who are willingto be measured (Pilsudski 1996:212-3, Letterno. 59).'

Laufer summarized his evaluation of the field survey onthe Ainu in the following manner:

I succeeded in obtaining a great deal ofethnological material and information,traditions, and a large amount of grammati-cal and lexicographical material, although ashort time only was available for this pur-pose. ... I am well satisfied with the resultsof my ethnographical researches among thesepeople. I have obtained full explanations oftheir decorative designs (Laufer 1899b:733-4).

I am of the opinion that Laufer did not record Ainutexts on wax cylinders. Despite the fact that he widelyinformed others about his success in recording Cilyakand Orok songs by the phonograph (Laufer 1899a:36),no other mention is found with regard to his Ainu re-cordings. On the contrary, an additional message runsas follows: "The only difficulty is that the instrumentcannot be used in the winter, owing to the effect ofsevere cold" (Laufer 1 899b:732). As we know, his Ainusurvey was conducted exactly in the mid-winter,through the month of January.

Toward the end of January, Laufer arrived onhorseback in Korsakov, the southernmost town of theSakhalin Island. Although he intended to return fromthere northward along the west coast of the island,this idea proved to be impossible, due to the lack ofany reliable means of communication in winter. Hence,he was obliged to return following the same track heused before, and proceeded "[a]s rapidly as possiblein order to reach Nikolaievsk'^ in time", i.e., by the end

1 37

of March. Thus in the morning of March 4, 1899, hereturned to the starting point of his Sakhalin journey(Laufer 1 899b:734), most probably the town of Aleks-androvsk, the Russian military post and sea-port situ-ated on the Northwest coast of Sakhalin Island. Here,he finished writing his field report cited above.

Was Laufer's Sakhalin expedition successful? As faras his own accounts are concerned, it appears thatLaufer was fully confident that he had fulfilled thewhole task assigned to him by Boas, and that thedata he collected would enable him to write a"rounded" ethnography of the Sakhalin people, i.e., theCilyak, the Orok, and the Ainu. In addition to thosefield reports quoted above (Laufer 1899a, 1899b,1900a), Laufer published a few other pieces with somedata gathered during his Sakhalin trip. These includehis short monograph on the decorative art of the AmurRiver people (Laufer 1902); two short articles on rock-paintings (Laufer 1899c, 1901); an article dealing withthe issue of the "Koropokguru" and "Tonchi" [prehis-toric people on Sakhalin Island—K.I.] (Laufer 1900b); asingle linguistic paper on Ainu numerals and phonol-ogy (191 7a); and a fairly long paper on the origin ofreindeer breeding in Siberia, in which he covered theOrok reindeer economy extensively (Laufer 191 7b).

Laufer's ethnography of the Nanay (Cold) peopleof the Amur River was once announced on the list offorthcoming JNPE publications as its Volume IV, Part II,entitled The Cold (Boas 1905:94). However, this mono-graph was never published and, moreover, as SergeiKan recently pointed out, was "probably never writ-ten" (Kan 2001:232). Besides, the Nanay are not amongthe Sakhalin indigenous people, as they reside alongthe Amur River on the mainland.

Then, why did Laufer never publish his advertisedmonograph on the Gold (Nanay) nor those on the Cilyak,Orok, and Ainu? Since I was unable to look through thevoluminous personal correspondence between Lauferand Boas at the American Philosophical Society in Phila-delphia, I can only speculate in trying to find a reason-able explanation. Even taking into account the various

other collections made by Laufer on his Sakhalin trip,including the ethnographic specimens now at theAMNH, the wax cylinders, his field notes, and manu-scripts, it is beyond my present focus to evaluateLaufer's legacy as a whole, that of a great scholar whoproduced more than 200 scientific publications (Anony-mous 1934:352-62; Hummel 1936:103-1 1). Laufer'sfurther career was different from his early fieldwork onSakhalin Island, as he "stood out primarily as an eth-nologist, and perhaps his chief contribution was theapplication of the principles of ethnology to historiccivilizations" (Kent 1934:349; Cale 1935:137). There-fore I am eager to confine my role here simply to avery general evaluation of what Laufer could (as wellas what he could not) achieve during his eight-month-long Sakhalin fieldwork.

As to the former, Laufer's contribution regardinghis collection of ethnographic specimens has been al-ready examined by several modern curators. Here onemay refer to Laurel Kendall's unpublished review ofLaufer's collection from the Amur River area (Kendall1986), as well as to the most recent evaluation ofLaufer's ethnographic collections from the entireSakhalin-Amur River region (Roon 2000). As far asLaufer's Ainu collection at the AMNH is concerned, itwas carefully examined recently by Prof. Y. Kotani fromNagoya University and his team (Kotani et al. 1993).According to their report, 418 Ainu items are preservedat the AMNH altogether, of which Laufer collectedthirty-eight items in 1898-1900. Although only nineitems are registered as obtained on the east coast ofSakhalin, we may safely conclude that the whole setof thirty-eight specimens was collected on Sakhalin,including three pieces of nettle robe, six "moustachelifters," and other utensils for everyday use (Kotani etal. 1993:118-20). This Ainu collection, though not nu-merous, well represents the Sakhalin Ainu culture atthe turn of the twentieth century, at a time when theAinu barely retained many traditional forms of theirculture. In this sense, Laufer's collecting was a success-ful enterprise, and we may well call him a successful

1 38

PARTICIPANTS/ LAUFER AND PILSUDSKI

field collector not only of Ainu, but probably also ofOrok and Nivkh (Cilyak) specimens. It would be desir-able for the Orok and Nivkh items obtained by Lauferto be also re-examined and re-assessed in the sameway.'°

With regard to what Laufer could not have achievedduring his Sakhalin journey, I cite another quote fromPilsudski's letter to Shternberg written at Rykovskoyeon September 4, 1898:

Oh yes, I have forgotten about a main issue.Young Doctor Laufer from Berlin, who is amember of an American expedition, hasalready been here. He heard of me still inVladivostok and wanted to drop inAleksandrovsk, but he didn't come. Then, Ileft for Rykovskoye. Hence, it was just herewhere we got acquainted with each other.He called upon me with another German, i.e.,an engineer. ... Laufer has remained atNatro. He has with him an interpreter, i.e., aGerman deportee. Laufer himself does notunderstand even a word in Russian, and it isinteresting to see what will come out. He isgoing to stay the whole winter. Although Idid not say anything definite, I was and amready to give advice, but he showed verylittle interest, and more often kept silentduring his visit. Despite my proposal that Iwould answer him whatever he might beeager to ask about, he appeared the secondtime not at the appointed hour, and thefollowing day he departed. I do not knowwhat will occur further. I did not give him myown notes, but I shall not refuse him in anyadvice and guidance (Pilsudski 1996:161-2,Letter no. 46).

Pilsudski's depiction of Laufer and his circumstanceson Sakhalin—however subjective and personal it mightbe—is the sole source so far that may disclose Laufer'sreal posture and behavior in the field. What was par-ticularly disappointing to me was Laufer's invariablereluctance to ask for Pilsudski's insight and advice,notwithstanding the latter's repeated offers. No fur-ther communication between the two ever took placeafter the expedition. I deeply regret this situation, sinceit was Laufer who could have benefited from Pilsudski'sconsultation and help. Pilsudski was then the only per-son on Sakhalin Island who was engaged in the study

of its Native people, the Nivkh, the Orok, and the Ainu.Therefore, he was an invaluable resource and the onlyavailable consultant at the very beginning of Laufer'sfieldwork. Besides, no language barrier existed betweenthe two, since Pilsudski was fully proficient in German.

With regard to Laufer's language competence,Pilsudski referred that "Laufer himself does not under-stand even a word in Russian." Although this was anexaggeration (since Laufer had mastered Russian in hisstudent years), often a foreigner who is competent inreading Russian, hardly understands the speech ofRussian village people, let alone the Russian speech ofindigenous people in Siberia. I encountered this exactsituation during my early fieldwork in Siberia. I wonderif Laufer, when placed in a similar situation, might nothave become fully dependent upon his local interpreter,"a German deportee." While Laufer used Russian as hisoperational language in the Nivkh and Orok surveys,he was unable to while among the Ainu, as mentionedabove. It was great loss that Laufer did not resort toasking for Pilsudski's help, since the latter was by thattime already proficient in Sakhalin Ainu to a certainextent.'^

It has to be taken into consideration that Lauferwas rushed into his Sakhalin fieldwork very shortly af-ter his doctorate course in philology, presumably withlittle if any training and preparation for field research(Cole 2001:36). The Sakhalin Island trip for the JNPEwas his first experience conducting an ethnologicalsurvey in this distant and inhospitable terrain, meaningthat he was obliged to educate himself in the field. Inaddition, he spent two-and-a-half months of his Sakhalinjourney recuperating from infectious diseases he hadcontracted there. Eventually, he finished an ethnologi-cal survey of the Sakhalin Island Nivkh, Orok, and Ainuwithin five-and-a-half months.

And yet, as seen from his field reports and earlypublications, Laufer was confident that he had fulfilledthe whole task assigned to him by Boas and that Lauferwas well satisfied with the results, even from his lesssuccessful Ainu survey. Are we then to call Laufer's

K. INOUE

1 39

Sakhalin expedition a "success"? I wish to refrain fromany final judgment for the time being, since many ofLaufer's Sakhalin materials are still missing and no fullaccount of his Sakhalin survey has been found. Someof his manuscripts may still be discovered, as hap-pened recently with Pilsudski's unpublished work andother materials (Pilsudski 1996, 1998a, 1998b; Inoue,1997b). But, it may also be possible that Laufer wastoo proud and too rigorous of himself to produce asubstantial ethnographic monograph with a level ofpreparation that he came to consider as insufficient.Or else, he simply did not like the idea of writing the"rounded" ethnography he was assigned to produce.

In the meantime, Pilsudski maintained a keen inter-est in Laufer's achievements and continued to askShternberg for information regarding Laufer's publica-tions. The references are numerous during the follow-ing years: "What has Laufer written on the Gilyak? Whereis it published?" (Pilsudski 1996:1 78, Letter no. 51 writ-ten in 1 902); "Did Laufer publish anything? I should liketo have his works not only on the Gilyak but also theAinu as the result of his trip on Sakhalin" (ibid, p. 212,Letter no. 59 written in 1 903); "Did Laufer write, didn'the?" (ibid, p. 259, Letter no. 81 written in 1910). If Lauferever knew of Pilsudski's persistent interest in hiswork, would that have helped to change his mindand initiate some contact between the two scholarsifnoX. during than c?/terLaufer'sJNPE Sakhalin-Amur sur-vey of 1 898-9?

And lastly, I refer to a statement made by Boas in1902, two years after Laufer's return from his JNPE field-work, when his Siberian collections were already pro-cessed at the AMNH and most of his Sakhalin contri-butions were already published and/or written down.In his summary paper on the Jesup Expedition presentedat the International Congress of Americanists in NewYork, Boas asserted that : "[A]t the present time weare unable to state definitely what the relations of theGilyak and Ainu to the other isolated Siberian tribes'^may have been. ... It remains for future researches toshow whether these tribes may definitely be classed

with the Northeast Siberian tribes" (Boas 1 905:99). Thismay be a signal of Boas' growing dissatisfaction withwhat Laufer achieved during his Sakhalin survey. I as-sume that this might have prompted Boas to contactShternberg for additional data on the Nivkh (Gilyak)and to try to enlist Pilsudski to conduct new Ainu studiesseveral years after the completion of the JNPE.

Pilsudski's "Second Expedition" to Sakhalin:A Non-Journey?

"I hear from a friend of mine, Mr. L. Sternberg that youare interested in Aino-folklore" (Inoue 1999a: 11 5). Thiswas the opening sentence of Bronislaw Pilsudski's firstletter to Franz Boas, written on December 19, 1907, inZakopane, a resort Polish town in western Galicia, thenunder the Austrian rule. Thus started Pilsudski's rela-tionship with Franz Boas through the introduction ofLeo (Lev) Shternberg.

Bronislaw Pilsudski (1866-1918), a Polish Siberiananthropologist was born in the manor of Zulow (present-day Zaiavas) in Wilna province (today's Lithuania), whichhad been annexed to the Russian Empire.''' In 1887,when he was 19 years old, Pilsudski, a freshman at St.Petersburg University, was arrested on the charge thathe had been involved in an abortive conspiracy toassassinate the Russian Czar, Alexander III. Pilsudskiwas sentenced to penal servitude for 1 5 years andexiled to the Sakhalin Island. He remained in the Rus-sian Far East for 19 years (Fig. 46), first as a "statecriminal" in Sakhalin (1887-97) and later as a "deportedpeasant" (1897-1906). After the Russian-Japanese Warof 1904-5, he managed to return—via Japan, the U.S.,and Western Europe—to the Polish province of Galicia,then under Austrian rule. He died in Paris on May 1 7,1918. Pilsud ski's death, often referred to as a suicide,occurred Just six months before the Polish statehoodwas resurrected owing to the efforts of his youngerbrother, the future Polish military dictator, Jozef Pilsudski(1867-1935).

In 1 899, Pilsudski was able to leave Sakhalin Is-land for Vladivostok, the main Russian port city on

1 40

PARTICIPANTS/ LAUFER AND PILSUDSKI

the mainland, where he found a job as a custodian atthe IVluseum of the Society for the Study of the AmurRegion. But, as early as 1901, he fell into depressionand apathy. His old friend, correspondent, and aSakhalin co-exile. Lev Shternberg tried to help him byorganizing new fieldwork for Pilsudski through the Im-perial Academy of Sciences. "Knowing that the solemedicine for him is the work, and understanding thatnobody can carry it out better than Pilsudski," Shtern-berg organized a trip to Sakhalin for Pilsudski (Latyshev1996:395). Thus, in July 1902, Pilsudski commencedhis new fieldwork among the Ainu on Sakhalin Islandwhere he had previously spent twelve years as apolitical prisoner. This was Pilsudski's "first Sakhalinexpedition," which was extended for two more years(1904-5) at Pilsudski's own request in 1903 under thesponsorship of the newly founded Russian Committeefor the Study of Central and East Asia'MInoue 1985:8).

Pilsudski's fieldwork in Sakhalin (1902-5) was high-ly successful despite the interruption of the Russian-Japanese War of 1904-5. Shortly before the war brokeout, Pilsudski took part in an unsuccessful Russian ex-pedition'^ (1903) to the Hokkaido Ainu, headed by aPolish ethnographer and writer, WaclawSieroszewski'^(Inoue 2003). Pilsudski collected valuable ethnographicspecimens, recorded folklore texts—especially on waxcylinders'^—and took numerous photos of the Ainu,Uilta (Orok), Nivkh (Gilyak), and Nanay (Gold) (Figs. 47-49; see also Latyshev 1998).

Six letters sent by Pilsudski to Boas between 1907-16 are preserved at the Franz Boas' Collection at theArchives of the American Philosophical Society in Phila-delphia (APS-BP), of which I reproduced the five thenavailable in an earlier Japanese publication (Inoue1990:309-18). Upon re-reading Pilsudski's six lettersto Boas'^ at the APS as well as his numerous letters toShternberg (cf. Pilsudski 1996), I have come to the con-clusion that Boas had helped Pilsudski a great dealbetween the years 1908 and 1918. Boas answered allPilsudski's letters promptly'^°; he published Pilsudski'sarticle on the Ainu in the Journal of American Folk-lore

K. INOUE

(Pilsudski 1912a); and he most probably acted as ago-between in the sale of Pilsudski's photos to variousAmerican museums (Figs. 46-49)'^'. He also persistedin encouraging Pilsudski to continue his scientific work.However, Pilsudski's biggest morale boost came, I be-lieve, when he was asked by Boas to go on a newSakhalin expedition in 1909. Although this trip nevermaterialized, the fact remained that Boas—one of theleading anthropologists of the time—regarded Pilsudskias a first-ranking expert on the Sakhalin Ainu.

Presumably, in the beginning of 1909, Pilsudskiwrote to Shternberg:

Several days ago, I received also a letterfrom Boas, who wrote [to] me to send aproposal to Chicago Museum, which mightprobably dispatch me to collect ethno-graphical specimens among the Ainu. Boasconsiders that Sakhalin Ainu artifacts aremore preferable to the Hokkaido ones,although the Hokkaido Ainu might be moreinteresting for me. He thinks that the wholeexpense may be 6000 dollars (Pilsudski1996:240, Letter no. 68).

And later he informed Shternberg about his progressin this task in another letter (stamped as March 8,1909),saying: "I have sent my proposal to Chicago, askingfor 2000 dollars for my work and living during 9-1 0months" (Pilsudski 1 996:243, Letter no. 71). In the nextletter to Shternberg (no. 72), however, Pilsudski reportedthat "From Chicago I have received no answer, eventhough I asked to let me know by telegram about thedecision, so as to prepare for my departure as early aspossible. Now I want to write again, asking for theanswer. I had better write to Boas himself (Pilsudski1996:245; the date is missing). Presumably, Pilsudskiwrote a new letter to Chicago, and on May 10, 1909,he informed Boas that:

[I] have received the answer from Dr. Dorsey,who writes me [that] Chicago Field Museumwishes [to] send me to the Ainu and will takesteps to secure the sum of 6000.00$ andrequest You to ascertain what I mightundertake to the Journey (APS-BP, no. 470;Inoue 1999a:123).

1 4 1

On October 1 0, 1 909, Pilsudski wrote the first letter toShternberg from Paris:

Not the slightest answer from either Dorseyor Boas. I asked Boas to give me instructions,as to what I should pay attention to. I wouldagree to go to Sakhalin, if he considered itindispensable, even if I myself had planned atrip to Northern Hokkaido. Boas wrote inreply that he didn't write to me, since he hadheard nothing from Dorsey. Here [i.e., inParis—K.I.] Prof. Manuorte" told me thatDorsey worked in a very large museum, andthat I should turn up the heat, but how andin what way? I understand myself that this isthe only way-out for me. But, how to breakthrough? I wrote to Hawes'' who wascurrently professor at Madison, but I havereceived no reply. I want to ask Kennanwho once promised me help, if it wasnecessary (Pilsudski 1996:248, Letter no. 75).

And, on November 7, 1909, Pilsudski again wrote toShternberg from Paris:

I got a letter from Dr. Dorsey, who wasalready in Europe and six weeks afterwardswas planning to come to me in Lwow. Ianswered that I was at the moment in Parisand preferred to see him here. And, in case hecould not come, I would try to appear wher-ever he asks (Pilsudski 1996:250, Letter no. 76).

Pilsudski's next letter to Shternberg (the date ismissing but the letter was most probably sent inNovember 1909) includes the following direct quota-tion from Dorsey's letter, which runs:

I thank you for the references you gave me inCracow and will be glad to call upon yourfriends. I shall probably not reach Calicia fortwo or three months yet. I am sorry there hasbeen this delay in our getting together, but Iwill warn you that you cannot in any senseconsider yourself as employed by the FieldMuseum until I have taken the matter upformally with my Director and secured hispermission, and before this can be broughtabout, it is necessary that I should talk thesituation over with you. I say this, feeling lestyou might be disappointed (Pilsudski1996:252, Letter no. 77).

Pilsudski's letter to Shternberg (no. 76) goes on:

I'm writing the same to Boas, who will besurprised at the fact that Dorsey has not

seen me yet, since he promised Boas to doso on leaving the US. I want to proposeDorsey two plans: one is that I remain herefor a year in order to learn more English, towork on what could be done by treating thematerials at hand, to look up more literature,and to obtain practical training both inphotography and anthropometry. The otherplan is to start a field trip this winter, if he isin a hurry and doesn't want to postpone it.And anyway, if there were something for meto receive in St. Petersburg, I should secure it(Pilsudski 1996:250-1).

Meanwhile, commenting bitterly on Dorsey's letter,Pilsudski writes to Shternberg:

Consequently, it delays, he writes to menothing of when we shall meet, obviouslythree months later and not earlier, and he willstill return to America and have a talk withthe director, although in his first letter he saidthat he was going to discuss with thedirector. No doubt, there cannot be any tripin 1910. There can be a better development,too. But, I'm afraid that nothing will come ofit and it will be necessary for me to dosomething, without any expectation(Pilsudski 1 996:252, Letter no. 77).

It seems to me that Pilsudski never met with Dorsey,since I have found no reference to this meeting in hisletters to either Shternberg or Boas. And, consequently,his second Sakhalin expedition did not take place atall—not only in 1910 but also later, as Pilsudski hadanticipated. The reason(s) and the cause(s) of why theidea was eventually dropped remain unknown. Myguess is that too many personal motives were involved.

George Amos Dorsey (1868-1931), an Americananthropologist, held the position of curator in chargeof Anthropology at the Field Columbian Museum ofNatural History in Chicago from 1898 to 1915. Hetook a three-year leave (1909-12) from his museumwork and traveled abroad as a foreign correspon-dent for The Chicago 7r/i»iv/ie (Calhoun 1991:1 53-4).Therefore, although he arrived in Europe in 1909, hewas surely too busy to meet Pilsudski even in Paris. InEurope, Dorsey was acting not as a Field Museumcurator but primarily as a journalist. Besides, I wonderif the well-documented personal hostility between

1 42

PARTICIPANTS/ LAUFER AND PILSUDSKI

30/KwakiutI Indians dancing at the Chicago Worlds Fair. Photographer, John H. Crabill, i 893 (AMNH 337217).

1 43

31/Franz Boas, with George Hunt and his family, Fort Rupert, B.C. Photographer, Oregon C. Hastings,November 1894 (APS neg. # 466)

1 44

THE KWAKIUTL INDIANS.

697

[To page 464.]

SONG OF HA'MSHAMTSES.

1. Hamasa'ya'lag-ila haisai ye hamamamai.

Trying to look for food all around yo hamamamai.the world

2. Ba'bakuaya'lag-ila haisai ye hamamamai.

Looking for men all around tlie ye hamamamai.world

3. Q'ula' mEiisayag-ila haisai ye hamamamai.

Life swallowing all around the ye hamamamai.world

4. Xa'xauquaya'lag'ila haisai ye hamamamai.

Looking for beads all around the ye hamamamai.world

TUNK, RECORDKD BY F. BOAS.

J. =72.

He ye ha ma ma ma ha ma ma mai ha -

Beating. J^l^lJ' IJ^*'/*'/!®**-

—•—

1— 1

r3

*

il^', —

t

- -X

—t _ t _

ma - saba - kua

ya -ya •

g'i -g'i -

A

la

la etc.

a a -

hai

sai

P—^

h—y—

1—•

1

_t

•—

s>-^

1 ^

—)- 1+-—

9i- ha ba ma - ma ma a mai. ..

=3(i fr-f-_

^ P=

1

1 1- ^'

_i5iJ=± 1=

-t 1 F

ha me mai ba ma - ma ma mai ha me ma he

ha - ma - ma mai ha ma a ma mai ha me mai ha

±

m

ma a ha ma mai ha ma - ma - me ha - me.

32/Musical notation by Franz Boas: Song ofHa'msliamtses. Reprinted from: Franz Boas, Tine Social Organizationand Secret Societies of the KwakiutI Indians, Report of the U.S. National Museum for 1895. 1897, p.697

1 45

33/ Hamatsa skull rattle (Kwakiutl). Collected byGeorge Hunt in Quatsino, B.C., 1899. Photo by LyntonGardiner, (AMNH Cat. #16/6897, neg. 2A 19017)

34/Pit house, Spences Bridge, B.C. Photographer, Harlan Smith, 1897 (AMNH 42776)

1 46

35/ Wax cylinder machine: Edison Standard Phonograph with horn, ca. 1900. Photo by Carl Fleischhauer. Library ofCongress, American Folklife Center

1 47

36/ Lucy Antko, wife of James Teit, one of the six singers recorded by Franz Boas at Spences Bridge, B.C., 1897.Photographer, Harlan Smith, i 897 (AMNH 22695)

1 48

37/ James Teit and two friends in Lerwick, Scot-land, prior to his departure to Canada. Courtesy ofSigurd Teit

38/ James Teit's uncle John Murray in British Colum-bia, circa 1888. Courtesy of Sigurd Teit

1 49

39/Spences Bridge, / 887. Note John Murray's white cottage is visible on theleft. His store is the large building in the center of the photograph. Courtesy ofthe Kamloops Archives (Kamloops, BC)

40/ Spences Bridge, circa1890. This photo showsSpences Bridge on bothsides of the ThompsonRiver. Courtesy of SigurdTeit

1 50

»

41/Drying salmon on the beach on the north side of the Thompson River, just below John Murray's store. Courtesyof Sigurd Teit.

1 5 1

43/ James Teit in his cabin at Tswall Creek. Courtesy of Sigurd Teit

] 53

44/ James Teit and George Tomaxkain on the banks of the Thompson River, 1890. Courtesy of Sigurd Teit

1 54

45/ James A. Teit and Harlan I. Smith's pack train, Spences Bridge. Courtesy of the British Columbia ProvincialArchives, Vancouver.

1 55

46/ Bronislaw Pilsudski, three "Oltchi" (Ulchi) men, and a local settler. Studio photo. Original hand-writtencaption by Pilsudski: "Oltchi (Mangun) from Amur River. Three standing men are Oltchi (the middle is son of aChinese man and Oltchi woman), the sitting I am (the left) and a Jew (the right)." (SI-NAA 041253.00)

1 56

47/ Sakhalin's Ainubear festival. Photogra-pher, BronislawPilsudski. Original hand-written caption byPilsudski: "Ainu ofSaghalien. The bear-fest. The bear iswounded." (STNAA047396.00)

1 5 7

49/Sakhalin Ainu bear festival. Photographer, Bronislaw Pilsudski. Original caption by Pilsudski: "Ainu ofSaghalien.The bear-feast. The feast about the killed bear." (SI-NAA 047398.00)

1 58

Dorsey and Boas (cf. Freed et al. 1988b:97-8) mighthave contributed to the collapse of the planned newSakhalin affair.

In the meantime, Boas was eager to help Pilsudskiin the venues he controlled. In 1908, Boas tried topublish Pilsudski's abundant Ainu folklore material inthe U.S." Boas advanced this possibility to an AMNHpatron, Arthur Curtis James, by asking him a directquestion: "Would you be sufficiently interested in thismatter to let me look over the material in detail andgive you a more definite report regarding the valueand the status of his manuscripts?" (Franz Boas to A. C.James, June 6,1908, APS). Although this proposal failed,it is evident that Boas was seriously interested inPilsudski's Ainu material and regarded it very highly. Atthe end of his letter to A. C. James, Boas presented hisevaluation: "I am reasonably certain from what I knowabout it that it is exceedingly unlikely that material ofthis kind could ever be duplicated" (ibid.).^*'

In Lieu of a Conclusion

Notwithstanding his passion and endeavor. Boas couldnot succeed in either obtaining the desired publica-tions from Laufer's Sakhalin survey nor in incorporatingShternberg's as well as Pilsudski's contributions intothe JNPE proceedings. Hence, the Jesup Expeditionprogram on Sakhalin Island remained "unfinished"for several decades to come. Sakhalin Island, or moreproperly the larger Sakhalin-Amur River area, was ofcritical importance to Boas. This portion of the trans-Pacific "Jesup region," from the Amur River in NorthernAsia to the Columbia River in North America presenteda unique cultural area, where the deeply rooted cul-tural impact from, and connections with, the ancientagricultural civilizations of China, Korea, and Japan metwith the hunter-gathering cultures of the North Pacificindigenous people. This was why, in my view. Boastried very hard to organize a multidisciplinary studyof this area under the JNPE program. He asked Lauferand Fowke, an archaeologist, to do the same Job thathe had assigned to Bogoras and Jochelson in more

northerly areas in Northeast Siberia as well as toSmith, Swanton, and others (but first and foremost tohimself) on the Northwest Coast of North America.However, neither Laufer nor Fowke were in any waycomparable to Bogoras, Jochelson, or to Boas himself,as field researchers.

Due to repeated failures of Boas' several attemptsto document the culture, the Sakhalin-Amur area re-mained one of the least studied sections under theJNPE program and for years afterwards. The initial effortwas not completed until almost ninety years later. In1998, the Mouton de Cruyter Publishers started thepublication of The Collected Works ofBmnislaw Pilsudskiin seven volumes. The first two volumes are alreadyprinted (Pilsudski 1998a, Pilsudski 1998b). The firstvolume, entitled The Aborigines of Sakhalin, containstwenty of Pilsudski's articles on the Ainu, Nivkh (Gilyak),and Uilta (Orok), which had been published previouslyin various languages (Russian, Polish, Japanese, etc.),and have been translated into English by the volume'seditor. Prof. Alfred F. Majewicz from Poznan. The sec-ond volume is a modern reprint of Pilsudski's only Ainumonograph published in his lifetime (Pilsudski 1912b),with the addition of An Ainu English Index Dictionary toB. Pilsudski's Materials, compiled by Alfred and ElzbietaMajewicz (Pilsudski 1998b). Subsequent volumes in-clude Nivkh/Cilyak folklore texts, the Orok grammarand dictionary, vocabularies of the Nanay and Olchalanguages, and other contributions by Pilsudski, whichwere discovered recently as unpublished manuscripts.These works were mainly the products of Pilsudski'sfirst Sakhalin expedition of 1902-5.

As The Collected Works of Bronislaw Pilsudski willbe finally available to scholars eighty years after thedeath of their author, it is safe to say that Pilsudski wasone of the critical figures in the ethnography of theSakhalin-Amur region. He was a contemporary of theJesup Expedition efforts and was in contact with someof its key participants, like Boas, Laufer, and Shternberg.Therefore, we have but to regret that Pilsudski'sexpertise was never used by Laufer during his field

K. INOUE

work on Sakhalin. Nor was Franz Boas fortunate in thefollowing years in strengthening his cooperation withPilsudski—either through American publication of hisfolklore materials in 1 907-8 (Inoue 1 999a: 11 5-20) orin arranging Pilsudski's "second Sakhalin expedition"of 1909-10 that never materialized.

Acknowledgements

This paper is a substantially revised version of the origi-nal presentation delivered at the Franz Boas' Cente-nary Conference in New York (November 1 3-1 7, 1997;Inoue 1999b). In the present paper, the original sec-tions that dealt with the relationship between Shtern-berg and Pilsudski are omitted, and a new sectionfocused on Berthold Laufer's work on Sakhalin Islandwas added, thanks to the suggestion of Igor Krupnik.My thanks are due, first of all, to Igor Krupnik, for hispersistent encouragement and support; to Prof. JiroIkegami, Hokkaido University; and to my colleagues atthe Slavic Research Center, Hokkaido University, fortheir valuable comments to the earlier draft of this text.I am also grateful to Paula Fleming from the NationalAnthropological Archives (NAA), Smithsonian Institu-tion and to the NAA staff for assistance and permis-sion to use four of Pilsudski's original Sakhalin photo-graphs as illustrations to this paper.

Notes

1. This is confirmed by one of Laufer's earli-est reports published in Globus, which says that"[D]r. Laufer left New York in May 1 898 and trav-eled to Sakhalin Island via Japan and Vladivostokwhere he lived among the various local races fromSummer 1898 until March of 1899." (Laufer1899a:36).

2. See one of the studio portraits of the AmurRiver people that Laufer ordered to be taken(Fitzhugh and Crowell 1988:25).

3. The place where Laufer fell ill was mostprobably the village of A/£?rro (Pilsudski 1996:161).

4. Without doubt, this was not a Tungus (i.e.,Evenk) but the Uilta (Orok) village, since Muiko wasknown as an Orok summer campsite on the PoronayRiver (Oral communication by Prof. Jiro Ikegami).

5. The book referred to here is by Leopoldvon Schrenck (1 881-95).

6. Lake Nevskoye on present-day maps.

7. A contemporary Russian name is Ust'-Dolinki.

8. All quotations from Pilsudski's letters thathave been published in Russian (see Pilsudski1996) were translated into English by myself.

9. The town of Nikolayevsk-na-Amure, themain Russian administrative center located on thecontinent, is at the mouth of the Amur River, acrossthe Mamiya/Tatar Strait from the Sakhalin Island.

1 0. This task was recently fulfilled by TatyanaP. Roon from the Sakhalin Regional Museum (Roon2000). For over nine months, between December1998 and September 1999, she conducted anextensive survey of the Amur and Sakhalin ethno-graphic collections preserved at the various Ameri-can museums.

11. Friedrich Kleie, an oil prospector. Cf.Pilsudski 1996:309, Note 99.

12. A testimony thereto was given by JohnBatchelor who met Pilsudski in Hokkaido in 1 903.Batchelor writes: "I met this gentleman [i.e.,Pilsudski—K.I.] in Sapporo several years ago andthe only language we could properly converse inwas Ainu! He in Saghalien Ainu and I in Yezo."(Batchelor 1938:3).

1 3. Evidently, the Chukchi, Koryak, Even, andthe Yukagir, surveyed by other JNPE Siberian teams.

14. Main biographical sources on BronislawPilsudski in English are: Inoue 1 985; Sawada 1 985;Kowalski 1995; Majewicz 1998.

1 5. The Chairman of the Committee was Prof.Vasily V. Radloff, then Director of the Russian Im-perial Museum of Anthropology and Ethnography(Kunstkamera). Shternberg was appointed as theCommittee's executive secretary. Concerning theCommittee, see Inoue 1999b:146.

16. The expedition was organized by theRussian Imperial Geographical Society and theRussian Academy of Sciences. Being invited asthe only Ainu expert in Russia, Pilsudski joinedthe team directly from Sakhalin. It was on thisoccasion that he met John Batchelor in Sapporo(see above note 1 1 and also Inoue 2003)

17. Waclaw Sieroszewski (1858-1945), aPolish revolutionary exile to Siberia, was an au-thor of the basic ethnography on the Sakha

1 60

PARTICIPANTS/ LAUFER AND PILSUDSKI

(Yakut) people (Seroshevskii 1896). From his tripto Hokkaido, he published two small pieces oftravelogue entitled '"Wsrod kosmatych ludzi"(Among the Hairy People) in 1926 and "VolcanoBay"{]903). Both were included in Sieroszewski'sCollected Works, vol. 1 8 (1 961).

1 8. It appears that Pilsudski followed Laufer'sexample of making use of the Edison phonographin recording Native language and folklore. In 1 981,some eighty years afterwards, more than eightyoriginal phonographic cylinders on which Pilsudskihad recorded Ainu folklore texts and which werepreserved at A. Mickiewicz University in Poznan,Poland, gave birth to the so-called ICRAP (the In-ternational Committee for the Restoration and As-sessment of Bronislaw Pilsudski's Work). ICRAP hasbeen engaging in editing and publishing The Col-lected Works ofB. Pilsudski, in seven volumes, underthe editorship of Prof. Alfred F. Majewicz of A.Mickiewicz University in Poznan.

19. They are registered as "Franz Boas Pa-pers, nos. 1 1 69; 41 4; 470; 607; 472" (APS-BP), anda letter without any catalog number (Inoue 1 999a).

20. Unfortunately Boas' letters to Pilsudski arenot preserved at the APS, except for one carboncopy (APS-BP, no. 524a), which is reproduced in:Inoue 1 999a:l 30-1. Nevertheless, there are signsof Boas' answers, as indicated by handwrittenmessages found on a letter sheet: "F.B./ OrderedJuly 7, 1914" and "Answered July 7th" (APS-BP, no.472; Inoue, 1 999a: 1 27-8).

21. APS-BP, no.607; Inoue 1999a:125.

22. Latyshev's reading for this name notwith-standing, it was in fact French physical anthro-pologist Louis Pierre Manouvrier (1 850-1 927), thatPilsudski had referred to here. For this clarifica-tion, I want to thank Aleksandr M. Reshetov ofthe Museum of Anthropology and Ethnography(MAE) in St. Petersburg, who has kindly confirmedits Cyrillic spelling as "Manuvriye," looking up theoriginal hand-written letter.

23. Charles H. Hawes, a British traveler, whopublished a book on the Russian Far East entitledIn the Uttermost East (1 903).

24. George Kennan, an American journalist,who published several books, including an excel-lent essay, Siberia and the Exile System (1 891).

25. On Dec.l 9, 1 907, in his first letterto Boas,Pilsudski made a proposal to deliver a complete

set of Ainu folklore texts (240 tales andl20riddles) to be published in America, if he wereguaranteed a monthly income of $120 for eightmonths (APS-BP, no.l 169; Inoue, 1999a:1 17).

26. Pilsudski's Ainu folklore material was par-tially published by Boas in a short article (Pilsudski1912a). Most probably, however, Boas meanthere the whole material that Pilsudski had offeredto Boas for publication (cf. note 25). It was printedin Poland as a more extended collection (Pilsudski1 91 2b). That was Pilsudski's only monograph pub-lished during his lifetime.

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1936 Berthold Laufer: 1874-1934. American Anthro-pologist 38(1): 101 -1 1. Bibliography prepared by PaulS. Martin, pp. 103-11.

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Kan, Sergei

2001 The "Russian Bastian" and Boas. Why BoasShternberg's "The Social Organization of the Cilyak"Never Appeared Among the Jesup North Pacific Ex-pedition Publications. In Gateways. Exploring theLegacy of the Jesup North Pacific Expedition, 1897-1902. Igor Krupnik and William W. Fitzhugh, eds. Pp.

21 7-56. Contributions to Circumpolar Anthropology,1. Washington, DC: Arctic Studies Center.Keeling, Richard

2001 Voices from Siberia: Ethnomusicology of theJesup Expedition. In Catevi/ays. Exploring the Legacyof the Jesup North Pacific Expedition, 1897-1902.Igor Krupnik and William W. Fitzhugh, eds. Pp. 279-96. Contributions to Circumpolar Anthropology ,1.Washington, DC: Arctic Studies Center.

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1993 Hokubei no Shuyo Ainu Korekushon Ichiran[Lists of Main Ainu Collections at Various NorthAmerican Museums]. In Ethnological Study of AinuMaterials in North American Museums. YoshinobuKotani, ed. Pp. 89-1 70. Nagoya: Nagoya University.

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1 995 The European Calendarium (Bronislaw Cinet-Pilsudski in Europe, 1906-1 8). Linguistic and OrientalStudies from Poznan 2:7-19. Poznan: Adam Mickie-wicz University.

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1 996 Predvaritel'nyi otchet Bronislawa Pilsudskogo[A preliminary Report of Bronislaw Pilsudski]. VestnikSakhalinskogo Muzeia 3:394-7, Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk:Sakhalin Regional Museum.

1 998 Nauchnoe nasledie Bronislawa Pilsudskogo vmuzeiakh i arkhivakh Rossii [Scientific Legacy ofBronislaw Pilsudski preserved at Russian Museumsand Archives]. Izvestia Instituta nesledia BronislawaPilsudskogo 1:4-20. Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk: Sakhalin Re-gional Museum.

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1 899a Laufer's ethnologische Forschungen auf derInsel Sachalin. Globus, Bd.LXXVI:36. Braunschweig

1 899b Ethnological Work on the Island of Saghalin.Sc/e«ce,n.s. 9(230):732-4.

1 899c Petroglyphs on the Amoor. American Anthro-pologist, n.s. 1:746-50.

1900a Preliminary Notes on Explorations amongthe Amoor Tribes. American Anthropologist, n.s. 2:297-339.

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Urgeschichte 5(6):321 -30. Jena.1 901 Felszeichnungen vom Ussuri. Globus, Bd.LXXIX

(5):69-72, Braunschweig.1 902 The Decorative Art of the Amur Tribes. The

Jesup North Pacific Expedition, vol. 4, pt. 1. Memoirs

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79. New York: C. E. Stechert.1 91 7a The Vigesimal and Decimal Systems in the Ainu

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1998 The Scholarly Profile of Bronislaw Pilsudski. InThe Collected Works of Bronislaw Pilsudski. Alfred F.Majewicz, ed. Pp. 14-36. Berlin and New York: Mou-ton de Cruyter.

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1912a Ainu folklore. Journal of American Folk-Lore 2 5(95):72-86.

1912b Materials for the Study of the Ainu Languageand Folklore. Cracow: Polska Akademia Umiejetnosci.

1 985 Materials for the Study of the Orok (Uilta) Lan-guage and Folklore, I. Working Paper of the Instituteof Linguistics, 16. Alfred F. Majewicz, ed. Poznan:Adam Mickiewicz University.

1 987 Materials for the Study of the Orok (Uilta) Lan-guage and Folklore, II. Working Paper of the Instituteof Linguistics, 1 7. Alfred F. Majewicz, ed. Poznan:Adam Mickiewicz University.

1989 I z poyezdki k orokam o. Sakhalina v 1904 g.[From a Trip to the Orok on Sakhalin Island in 1904].Vladislav M. Latyshev, ed. Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk:Sakhalin Regional Museum.

1996 "Dorogoi Lev lakovlevich..." (Pis'ma L. la. Shtern-bergu. 1893-1917gg.) ['Dear Lev Yakovlevich... "(Let-terstoL. Ya. Shternberg. /S93-/9/7j]. Compiled, in-troduced, and annotated by Vladislav M. Latyshev.Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk: Sakhalin Regional Museum.

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Roon, Tatiana

2000 Kollektsii narodov Amuro-Sakhalinskogoregiona v muzeiakh SShA (Ethnology Collections onthe Peoples of the Amur and Sakhalin Regions inAmerican Museums). Izvestia Instituta naslediyaBronislawa PilsudskogoA: 1 39-57. Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk:Sakhalin Regional Museum.

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1 985 B. Pilsudski in Japan. In Proceedings of the Inter-national Symposium on B. Pilsudskl's PhonographicRecords and the Ainu Culture. Pp.20-3, Sapporo:Hokkaido University.

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1881-95 Die Voelker des Amur-Landes. In Reisenand Forschungen im Amur-Lande in den Jahren 1854-6 im Auftrage der Kaiserl. Akademie der Wissen-schaftenzu St. Petersburg. Bd. III. Pts.1-3. St. Peters-burg: Eggers.Seroshevskii, Vatslav (Sieroszewski, Waclaw)/ 896 Yakuty: opyt etnograficheskogo issledovania(The Yakut. An Ethnographic Study). St. Petersburg:Izdanie Imperatorskogo GeograficheskogoObshchestva.

1961a Volcano Bay. In Varia: Szkice podroznicze iwspomnienia. Waclaw Sieroszewski, Dziela. Tom XVIII.Pp.201-8. Krakow: Wydawnictwo Literackie.

1 961 b Wsrod kosmatych ludzi. In Varia: Szkice podroz-nicze i wspomnienia. Waclaw Sieroszewski, Dziela. TomXVIII. Pp.219-74. Krakow: Wydawnictwo Literackie.

Shternberg, Lev

1 999 The Social Organization of the Cilyak. BruceGrant, ed. Anthropological Papers of the AmericanMuseum of Natural History, 82. New York.

Vakhtin, Nikolai B.

2001 Franz Boas and the Shaping of the JesupExpedition Siberian Research, 1895-1900. In Gate-ways. Exploring the Legacy of the Jesup North Pa-cific Expedition, 1897-1902. Igor Krupnik and Wil-liam W. Fitzhugh, eds. Pp. 71-89. Contributions toCIrcumpolar Anthropology, 1. Washington, DC: Arc-tic Studies Center.

K. INOUE

J

Louis ^hotndge and Indigenous 1 iingit

thnOgrapht): Ti^en and Now

NORA MARKS DAUENHAUERAND RICHARD DAUENHAUER

One of the lasting features of Franz Boas' work duringand after the years of the Jesup Expedition was hiscollaboration with indigenous writers and intellectualssuch as George Hunt for KwakiutI, Henry Tate forTsimshian, and Louis Shotridge for Tlingit. As far as wecan tell, these relationships were productive and mu-tually beneficial, and resulted in scholarship of endur-ing quality and value. Details of how Boas' workingrelationships actually shaped the texts are only morerecently attracting critical attention (Rohner 1969;Hymes 1985; Maud 1993, n.d.)- In Tlingit, for example,Boas, working with Louis Shotridge, a Tlingit Indianfrom Klukwan, was able to document Tlingit phonol-ogy accurately for the first time (Boas 1917). This analysishas been confirmed by subsequent generations of lin-guists. For his part, Shotridge attended Boas' lecturesat Columbia University, and he benefited greatly fromBoas' training in phonetics and current anthropologi-cal theory and methods. Shotridge became the firstTlingit, and possibly the first Northwest Coast Native,with professional training in linguistics and anthropol-ogy. He led expeditions to the Northwest Coast, andbetween 1913 and 1929 he published several articlesin the University of Pennsylvania Museum Journal, one ofwhich is the subject of this chapter.

Louis Shotridge and the Jesup ExpeditionConnection

Although not a part or project of the Jesup Expeditionper se, Shotridge's work belongs to the spirit of the

Jesup Expedition era and is intimately linked to oneof its major figures, Franz Boas. The beginning oftheir collaboration falls within the wider timeframeof the period, and, along with the work of JohnSwanton, it forms one of the cornerstones of Tlingitresearch and publication. His work with Boas seemsto have been a pivotal event in shaping Shotridge'scareer. This chapter covers the biographical and his-torical background of the relationship and examinesthe mutual influence of Boas and Shotridge on eachother's work. Focus is on the scholarly publicationsof language and folklore by Louis Shotridge, espe-cially his 1920 article, "Ghost of Courageous Ad-venturer," and his role in the 1917 grammar of Tlingitby Boas.

The chapter examines and evaluates Louis Shotridgeas a Tlingit intellectual in the western, academic senseof the term; as the first indigenous transcriber and trans-lator of Tlingit oral literature; and as a stylist in English.He deliberately used archaic English and "poetic dic-tion" in an attempt to retain the integrity of the originalTlingit style. The result is a highly crafted translation,but one that is awkward by modern standards anddifficult for or even unintelligible in places to the aver-age contemporary reader. Parallels between the stiltedEnglish and everyday Tlingit become clear when theEnglish is back-translated into Tlingit (a work in progressby Nora Marks Dauenhauer, not included here). Theheart of the paper is Nora Marks Dauenhauer's newEnglish editing of Shotridge's 1920 translation.

1 65

Biographical Background and Early Careerof Louis Shotridge

Louis Shotridge was born in 1 882 in the Chilkat villageof Klukwan, in southeast Alaska. He died in Sitka in1937. He was the son and grandson of prestigiousTlingit leaders. His paternal grandfather, L Shaaduxisht(ca. 1819-1889) from whose Tlingit name the angli-cized form "Shotridge" derives, was a leader of theKaagwaantaan (Eagle moiety) Finned House (KeetCooshi Hit), an off-shoot of the Kaagwaantaan KillerWhale House, and was one of the leaders of the 1852Tlingit raid on the Hudson Bay trading post at Ft. Selkirkat the confluence of the Pelly and Yukon Rivers. Hisfather was George Shotridge (1852-1917), whoseTlingit name was Yeilgooxu, and who was leader ofthe prestigious and famous Whale House (Yaay Hit) ofthe (Raven moiety) Caanaxteidi. George was a friendof Lt. George Emmons, the famous ethnographer andcollector among the Tlingit (see Kan, this volume), andboth Louis' father and grandfather are well documentedin historical writings and photographs. Shotridge'smother was Kudeit.saakw of the Finned House Kaag-waantaan. Thus Louis belonged to the same housegroup as his paternal grandfather.

Louis Shotridge was no stranger to the English-speaking world. His family had a long history of inter-action with Euro-Americans, and he was educated inthe Presbyterian mission school. Louis' marriage to hisfirst wife Florence was arranged by their families atbirth, but their relationship blossomed at mission school.She was Susie F. Scundoo (c. 1 882-1 91 7), of the Moun-tain House Lukaax.adi, whose Tlingit name was Kaat><;waantsex. Photographs show her to be a stunningbeauty, and by all accounts she was a talented andcharming woman. They were married on December25, 1902, in Klukwan.

in 1905, Florence Shotridge was invited to dem-onstrate Chilkat weaving at the Portland InternationalExposition, and Louis accompanied her. There he metand impressed Dr. George Gordon of the University ofPennsylvania Museum, who a decade later hired Louis

as an agent and to document the museum's North-west Coast collection.

Milburn (1997) traces and examines a number ofphenomena that converged in the lives of Louis andFlorence Shotridge. The rise of tourism and the "curio"trade paralleled the start of museum collecting. At somepoint, Louis decided to become involved in the curioand collecting trade. He was no stranger to this activ-ity, the Chilkat area being influenced by earlier mu-seum collectors, such as the Krause brothers, Emmons,and various Presbyterian missionaries. The latter en-couraged Native carving as crafts to generate rev-enue, while Sheldon Jackson was collecting traditionalartifacts for his museum in Sitka (the future SheldonJackson Museum). Milburn observes that Shotridge'spursuit of an entrepreneurial career through his interac-tion with American society was consistent with theactivities of his father and grandfather, and she sug-gests that this may be seen as an attempt to maintainhis prestige within a rapidly changing Tlingit society(1997:103). Despite the high level of schooling in South-east Alaska, only a small percentage of Natives suc-ceeded in breaking into Euro-American professions. The"civilizing" rhetoric of Protestant missionaries was aimedat creating an indigenous laboring class. Perhaps Louisand Florence saw the curio market as a stepping-stoneto become involved in professional, intellectual work.

The years from 1 907 to 1 91 1 were highly produc-tive for the young couple. They hired tutors to teachthem English and music. Florence was an accomplishedpianist, and Louis is remembered for his outstandingbaritone voice. They performed duets and toured withan Indian Grand Opera Company. From the time whenFlorence was first asked to demonstrate Chilkat weav-ing through their years of participation in Indian fairsand the Opera, the Shotridges functioned as whatMilburn calls "cultural" entrepreneurs, re-inventing their"authentic" and "exotic" selves as the circumstancesdictated (Milburn 1997:11 7). It is difficult to evaluatethis phase of their careers, which seems embarrassingand stereotyped today. To some extent, Louis and

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PARTICIPANTS/ LOUIS SHOTRIDGE

Florence may have "bought into" this style of pre-sentation as the prevailing model, but even if theyfound it offensive and demeaning, living up to thepopular stereotype may have been the only vehicleavailable to them at the time. As his later careerdemonstrates, Louis Shotridge constantly foughtagainst the trivialization of Indian culture by thewhite establishment.

In 1910, Louis was offered a temporary position atthe University of Pennsylvania Museum in Philadelphia.He was essentially a "show and tell," dressing in PlainsIndian style to meet public expectation. Florence wasthe "Indian Princess." George Emmons urged the mu-seum officials to hire Shotridge full time. Edward Sapiralso wanted to hire him for the Canadian NationalMuseum in Ottawa, but Louis decided to stay inPhiladelphia. In 1912 he was admitted to the WhartonSchool of Finance and Economics, where he stud-ied for two years. Through talent, ambition, and hardwork, the Shotridges had achieved the educationaland social refinements that were necessary to par-ticipate in the middle-class worlds of academe, mu-seum patronage, and business administration(Milburn 1997:122). In 1913, Florence authored anarticle for the University of Pennsylvania MuseumJournal (Shotridge 191 3).

George Cordon, Franz Boas, and Shotridge'sFlourishing Career

In the meantime, George Gordon had been busily de-veloping an Anthropology Department at the Univer-sity of Pennsylvania Museum (UPM). In the winter of1914, he set up a meeting at Columbia University be-tween Louis Shotridge and Franz Boas. For two monthsthe two men worked together every morning record-ing Tlingit songs and phonetics. Some of the excite-ment of their working out the phonetics of Tlingit isrecorded in Shotridge's letters of November 4 and 1 7,1914, to Gordon (Milburn 1997:123-4,143). This re-search resulted in the publication of the first reliableTlingit grammar (Boas 1917). While in New York,

Shotridge also attended Boas' General Anthropologyclasses at Columbia University and participated inweekly anthropological discussions with a group ofpeers. Although he did not receive a formal degree,Shotridge was the first academically trained NativeAmerican ethnographer from the Northwest Coast. Thisachievement earned him the authority to work unsu-pervised within the Euro-American art/culture system.In 1915, Gordon offered Shotridge full-time employ-ment as Assistant Curator in the UPM North AmericanSection. He worked for the museum for the next sev-enteen years, the first Native American from the North-west Coast to be employed full-time within a museumcontext (Milburn 1997:124).

Growing interest in collecting texts in the indig-enous languages positioned Native ethnographers suchas Hunt and Shotridge in the forefront of scientific eth-nography. Milburn's fascinating study of the evolutionof anthropological thought during this period is be-yond our scope here, and we only note the develop-ing conflict between two personal and professionalinfluences on Shotridge's life: the clash between Boas(and other "scientific professionals") and George T.Emmons, the amateur entrepreneurial pragmatist.Shotridge had great potential as a cultural insider withoutside professional training. However, his circum-stances were very complex, and ultimately he contin-ued to be tokenized and stereotyped by the estab-lishment. But still, Shotridge managed to use the sys-tem and to exploit it to his own professional agenda,which, as Milburn demonstrates, was congruent withthe widely accepted progressive Tlingit societal goalsof the era.

In 191 5, Shotridge led the Wanamaker Expedition(1914-8) to Alaska (named after its sponsor, JohnWanamaker, department store magnate and memberof the UPM's Board of Managers; Milburn 1986:64-5),the first anthropological expedition led by an AlaskaNative. Much has been written about Shotridge as acollector, and most of that has been rather negative(cf. Mason 1960; Carpenter 1975; Cole 1985; Price

N. M. DAURENHAUER AND R. DAUENHAUER

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1998). Milburn reviews and refutes this anti-Shotridgeline of argument (Milburn 1997), and we agree withher. Shotridge's detractors have grossly oversimplified;much of their evidence is hearsay and is not borne outin reality. The situation in southeast Alaska was com-plex and times were changing rapidly. Shotridge hadtwo major agendas: to show the greatness of Tlingitculture through the clan art; and to find an institutionalsanctuary for Native art objects that were then beingseen as obsolete, negative, or contested in a Tlingitsociety that was advocating assimilation to westernnorms, patrilineal inheritance, and Christianity. In par-ticular, his collecting goals were then fully compatiblewith the "progressive" (modernist) cultural agenda ofthe Alaska Native Brotherhood, founded in 1912, ofwhich Shotridge was elected Grand President in 1930.It seems unlikely that Shotridge would have beenelected to the office of Grand President if his personallife and professional philosophy were not in keepingwith the mainstream or majority of the membership.

Thus, in his collecting practices, Shotridge sub-scribed to a "salvage paradigm." Rather than being inconflict, the acquisition goals of the University Museumand the Tlingit assimilationists' goals of removing tra-ditional art objects from the community were comple-mentary with each other and with Shotridge's personaland professional goals. Milburn sees this as a synthesisof Native Tlingit and institutional Euro-American atti-tudes and desires (1997:268). Shotridge worked topreserve what he considered to be the strengths ofhis heritage without compromising Native Americanability to achieve civil equality. In this regard Shotridgeexemplified the Native American struggle of the early1900s for recognition within the dominant society andhe was personally impacted by the ambivalent, oftencontradictory worlds within which he operated. Heevidently achieved support from the Alaska NativeBrotherhood (ANB) membership because he wantedto preserve and display objects as texts on the historyof Tlingit society and as monuments to Tlingit great-ness (Milburn 1986:203-4).

Personal tragedy entered Shotridge's life in 1917.His wife Florence had tuberculosis; her health deterio-rated and she died on June 12, 1917. One wonderswhat her achievements would have been had she livedanother twenty years or more, and shared the decadesduring which Louis' research and writing came to frui-tion. Louis remarried in 1919, and returned to Philadel-phia. His employment with the museum was secure;Gordon, the Anthropology Department's head, encour-aged and promoted Shotridge as a professional eth-nographer, and the next ten years were highly produc-tive. During these years, Shotridge continued to buildand document the collection, and he published eightarticles in the University Museum Journal, one of whichis the subject of this chapter (Shotridge 1920). Of hisassigned activities, Shotridge did not care for writing,but preferred fieldwork and collecting.

It was Shotridge's grand strategy to collect thoseobjects of clan art that best represent Tlingit societalhistory and show Tlingit social structure in a micro-cosm. His agenda was to show the greatness of Tlingitart and culture, but to do it in a clan-specific way. Hisattention to clan identity is reflected in his collectingand in his publications such as "Ghost of CourageousAdventurer" (Shotridge 1920) As noted previously,these items were becoming increasingly controversialin the Tlingit community because of the conversion toProtestant Christianity (which was much more intru-sive on Tlingit lifestyle than Russian Orthodoxy, andwhich also had the full backing of the American secu-lar authorities) and because of increasing conflict be-tween Native matrilineal and Euro-American patrilinealsystems of inheritance. Although recognition of clanownership was "notarized" through the traditional pro-tocol of reciprocity at potlatches, Shotridge felt thatthis was only temporary, because people forget,and times change. In contrast, a museum would pro-vide a permanent record of glory. This would be anhonorable alternative.

Shotridge also sensed a growing shift away fromthe clan system and toward the community as the

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unit of identity and political action. He saw future po-litical and social strength coming from a collective ap-proach. In retrospect, we can see even more clearlythat Shotridge perceived correctly that clan-centeredidentity and political power were already on the waneand were being replaced by western forms and con-cepts. The ANB and other Pan-Indian movements were(and are) community-based rather than clan-based. Thepattern becomes increasingly evident in the subsequenthistory of the ANB and later Native organizations, suchas Tlingit and Haida Central Council, and Alaska Fed-eration of Natives, culminating in the Alaska NativeClaims Settlement Act of 1971 and the creation ofregional, for-profit corporations; the latter (in 1921) hadno precedent or parallel in traditional Tlingit social struc-ture. Shotridge saw this coming, and made a specialeffort to collect and document Tlingit cultural achieve-ment on a clan-by-clan basis, from a Tlingit point ofview, in contrast to the more generic and western-based approaches of others.

Museum management, however, was then char-acterized by a conflict of priority between catering topublic display and public expectation, and pursuingthe advancement of science. Shotridge collected whatthe Tlingit considered significant, sometimes disagree-ing with museum management on this. As noted pre-viously, Shotridge wanted to represent the historicalgreatness of the Tlingit clans. In doing so, his workgoes far beyond formal classificatory analysis or col-lection of texts. Shotridge goes into the social andhistorical context of the art objects. He treated mythand legend as events that situated the various Tlingitclans in time and place, within history and geography.For Shotridge, the agents by which groups were dis-tinguished and by which social structure was definedwere visually articulated in crest objects. We will re-turn to this shortly.

The End of Louis Shot ridge's Career

By the end of the 1920s, Shotridge's career at the UPMwas winding down. George Cordon died in January

1928, and in August, Louis' second wife, Elizabeth, diedof tuberculosis. With the stock market crash of 1929and the Great Depression, funding became a prob-lem, and new management had interests in areas otherthan Native America. In 1932, after twenty years ofservice, Shotridge was dropped from the UPM staff.

Sometime between 1931 and 1932, Shotridge mar-ried for the third time. His last years were financiallytroubled, and in 1935 he was hired as a stream guardto police fishing. In July 1937 he apparently fell from aroof He was discovered and taken to the hospital inSitka, where he died ten days later, on August 6, 1 937.He was survived by his third wife and four children.Milburn emphasizes that the factual record sharply con-tradicts the sensationalized accounts of Shotridge'sdeath published in the 1960s and 1970s (Milburn1997:321; Cole 1985:266). These stories also circu-late in oral tradition. We, too, have heard the oral ac-counts cited by Cole (1985:266) but have preferrednot to discuss them. As much as they may be fascinat-ing folklore, they may not be accurate.

Shotridge's Concern with Context

Shotridge's insistence on the social and historical con-text of art objects raises an interesting and importanttheoretical debate. This is covered fully by Milburn(1 997: chapter 7, esp. 271 ff) but it is also necessary totouch on it briefly here. Major experts in Tlingit eth-nography of Shotridge's time, such as Emmons, JohnSwanton, and Boas differed in their approaches to ob-jects and their meanings. Emmons was probably clos-est to Shotridge in his interest in obtaining detailedNative interpretations of objects. Swanton explicitlydiscounted the association of myth, oral history, andthe imagery found on crest objects (Swanton1908:395), and Boas advocated a formalist approach,arguing that designs could be interpreted outside thesocial context of clan and personal history (see espe-cially Boas 1907:386-7, which is contained withinEmmons 1907 and discussed by Milburn 1997:272-3; see alsojonaitis 1995:306-35). Milburn concluded

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that "The tightly knit Tlingit relationship between so-cial structure, personal and clan histories, myths, andobjects was obscured when Boas opted to rely exclu-sively on a formal, decontextualized analysis of designsystems" (1997:273). Quoting Marjorie Halpin (1994:1 3), Milburn continues, "By separating art from its sto-ries. Boas and his followers separated art from the com-munity context which gave it meaning and life, and,finally, obscured the vital connection between art andthe land which, whether intentional or not, was part ofthe colonial enterprise of separating Natives from theirlands" (1997:2 74). For anthropological museums it wasessential to recontextualize ownership of Native Ameri-can objects within a Western patrimony because therewas no value in an exchange that continued to per-petuate concepts of Native ownership and the his-toric associations they represented. In this regard,Shotridge's emphasis on the particulars of collectiveownership was at odds with the anthropological con-figuration of objects within a Western system of ac-quisition and display (Milburn 1 997:274-5).

Milburn describes how Shotridge's emphasis on theaccurate representation of Tlingit society and historybecame even more of a focus after Gordon's death.Shotridge then had sole discretionary responsibility forcomposing and framing the collection. In the final yearsof Shotridge's employment, his work was essentiallyneglected by the UPM officials, enabling him to basehis purchasing decisions almost exclusively on his ownagenda rather than on more generalized visual or inter-pretative considerations. In the final analysis, his com-bined oral history and photographic record places ob-jects in the Shotridge collection at UPM among thebest documented of Northwest Coast objects in anynon-Native institution (Milburn 1997:271-2, 275).

The Knife and the Story as Text and Context

In 1920, Shotridge published "Ghost of CourageousAdventurer" in the University Museum Journal {Shot-ridge 1920). This article provides an excellent exampleof Shotridge's philosophy as described previously. It

documents the history and social context of a singleartifact in the collection—one that, in fact, might easilybe overlooked by the casual museum visitor. The Tlingitknife named "Ghost of Courageous Adventurer" (Fig.50) was acquired by Louis Shotridge in Sitka in 1918and was soon mentioned as being on display (Shot-ridge 1920:11). In his article, Shotridge shows howstories illuminate the complex relations between ob-jects, oral history, and social structure. It is a powerfulstory and an excellent example of Shotridge's concernwith keeping objects in their cultural contexts of clanownership and history—his emphasis on clan owner-ship and historical presentation, in contrast to timelessand decontextualized, generic display (Fig. 51). AsMilburn explains, "Shotridge's histories were intimatelyrelated to particular crest objects and the clans thatowned them. Because of their detailed oral historiesthe objects constituted a metonym for the existingfabric of Tlingit society" (Milburn 1997:345). This willbecome evident in his story and its frame.

In his opening paragraph, Shotridge explained thathis purpose was to illustrate how a selected object ofTlingit visual art represented its mythic prototypes, how"prototypes of animals of land, air, and water, and thedenizens of the unseen world are represented". In whatwas to be recognized as the hallmark of Shotridge'sstyle, he described in detail the object and how heacquired it:

To illustrate these arts, I have chosen, for thisarticle, a war knife. This specimen, althoughnot among the most conspicuous of themany important objects exhibited in theNorthwest Coast Hall of the UniversityMuseum, has its own story and has in fact aspecial importance. The knife itself, its name,the material in which it is wrought andeverything connected with it have manysentimental associations for the Tlingit.

The blade and guard are made of iron andthe pommel of ivory. The grip has an ironcore covered with mesh made from the hairof the wild goat. Both the iron and the ivoryare said to be the same pieces mentioned inthe legend given in the following pages. Theivory pommel is carved like a human skull

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which represents a ghost, the cavities beinginlaid with blue iridescent abalone shell thatglows with soft hues. The blade is wellhardened metal with sharp edges on bothsides, wrought out in one piece with one endreduced like a stem or tang which is driveninto the ivory pommel. A separate piece ofthe iron is shaped to fit the handle end toform a guard. The length of the weapon,from tip to the top of the handle, is fifteenand one-half inches.

I obtained this old knife from the last ofThunderbird House group of the Shungukeidi

50/ The "Chost of a Courageous Adventurer" knife,with sheath, both of which are associated with the story.UPM Coll #NA 8488 (knife 38.6cm long)

clan of Chilkat. It was the only object whichcarried with it to the present day a record ofthe important part which the clan took inestablishing a trade connection between thenorthern Tlingit and the alien tribes of theInterior. It was the last link with the past andtherefore the last thing with which the clanwas willing to part (Shotridge 1920:1 1-12).

The knife alludes to or recalls an expedition by theChilkat Tlingit from Klukwan over what is now knownas the St. Elias Range to the Copper River. The trekwas led by a man of the Shangukeidi clan named

N. M. DAURENHAUER AND R. DAUENHAUER

Gaayshaayi, who is called in the story by the Englishtranslation of his name. Eagle Head. Shotridge explains:

There is no accurate geographical informa-tion to be offered to indicate the exactlocation of the regions referred to in theaccount of the journey, and we can onlyguess at localities by computing the time ittook to walk from the starting point. Thelegend shows that after crossing the desertof ice, the party went along the Pacific coastall the way to what is now known as CopperRiver. This journey on foot, which is said to

51/ Yendaayank', the last direct descendant of Tlingitchief Eagle Head, who headed the party described in thestory, as photographed in Sitka, / 908.

have taken all of the favorable season,proved a difficult one. Even at the presenttime with maps and modern equipment, oneis often puzzled as to a safe course over thedeserts of ice along the way.

When the explorers returned to Klukwan, theold Native town on the Chilkat River where Iwas born, only very few of the men survived toreceive the honors of discovery and theprospect of acquiring riches. Some lost theirlives while crossing the ice and others died ofstarvation. The survivors on their return toldtheir story and made known the inhabited

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regions of the west coast. They also broughtback iron and ivory, articles previously unknownto the Tlingit people (Shotridge 1920:12-4).

The aspect of Shotridge's work that we focus on inthis chapter is his English version of the history that theknife recalls. The pattern of the text and context of thestory is typical in Tlingit folklife and oral tradition. Animportant narrative genre consists of accounts of howclans acquired the right to claim and use certain areas,objects, or crest designs, called in Tlingit at.dow, liter-ally meaning "an owned or purchased object." As inthe case of the knife, the purchase was through thelives of clan ancestors, whose experience gives subse-quent generations the right to claim and use the crestor object. As Shotridge articulates in an editorial com-ment in the story, "Only through sacrifice does manacquire something of value. It was at the cost of bravelives that we now have in our hands those objectsthat constitute our pride." For more on this, see NoraDauenhauer (1986, 1995) and Dauenhauer andDauenhauer (1987, 1990, 1994).

The Style of the Story

Shotridge's style in the story itself is quite differentfrom his style in the introduction cited above. The big-gest problem the modern reader immediately faces inthe story is Shotridge's use of archaic English. This wasa deliberate choice. He explains: "In rewriting the ac-count of the journey I have preserved the original formas far as translation from Tlingit to English permits. Thelanguage in which these legends are told is what mightbe called poetic in form and often archaic. It is a formof diction that will sometimes yield in translation toobsolete forms of English" (Shotridge 1920:14).

This raises a point of translation theory on whichwe disagree with Shotridge. Is it correct to use deliber-ately archaic and obsolete forms in translation if thestyle of the original is not really archaic or obsolete?Shotridge chose archaic English in an attempt to con-vey a sense of the Tlingit. He also used unnatural En-glish word order to convey a sense of Tlingit syntax.

On one hand, he brilliantly succeeds. Upon reading histext, Nora Marks Dauenhauer's first reaction was, "Icould hear the Tlingit on the back side of what he wassaying." In fact, this gave her the idea of back-translat-ing the English into Tlingit, a work currently in progressbut far from completion. She found this relatively easyto do, because the Tlingit grammar was so transpar-ent in Shotridge's English text. We are not suggestingthat there was ever a written Tlingit "Ur-text" from whichShotridge translated. Although Shotridge was a goodspeller of Tlingit and there are many examples of hislinguistic transcriptions of names and terms extant, itis unlikely that he ever transcribed or wrote a versionof the story down in Tlingit. It would be an archivist'sdelight if there were. But there is no extant text of thestory in Tlingit written by Shotridge, and we have noreason to assume that he ever did write it out in Tlingit.His written version composed in English is based onTlingit oral accounts. He probably called to mind oraltraditions that he had heard in Tlingit, and translatedthem into written English.

Shotridge undeniably succeeded in conveying asense of Tlingit in his English. The down side of thissuccess is that his translation is difficult and even unin-telligible to the average reader of English. It uses thefull set of archaic English locationals and directionals:here there where

hither thither whither

hence thence whence

These are not obsolete in Tlingit, and in fact matchquite well. Most educated readers would be able tofollow these. But some vocabulary sends even edu-cated readers, unless they are educated in Middle En-glish, to the dictionary, like:whilom = formerlyI trow = I thinkShotridge's impression and description of Tlingitas "poetic in form and often archaic" is true only rela-tive to his English translation. The style of Tlingit narra-tives such as this tends to be formal and conservativein Tlingit, but not alien or archaic. Unlike Tlingit oratory

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with its rich metaphor and simile that people considerbewildering and often call "old time Tlingit," the prosenarrative of crest stories is relatively straightforward.Therefore, one could argue that the level of style calledfor in English should be also formal and conservative,but not archaic or confusing. This is the balance wehave tried to strike in the revised translation: it is in-tended to be formal, but natural (see below). Thus, wedebated many of Shotridge's vocabulary choices. ForShotridge's "comrades," the word "buddies" was tooconversational. Likewise, the leader's taunt to his de-spondent trekkers, "Did you come here for pleasure?"sounds a bit stiff, but "Did you come here for a goodtime?" is too colloquial.

While the planned obsolescence of Shotridge'stranslation succeeds in conveying a sense of Tlingitstructure, it creates unnecessary barriers for all readers,even the most educated, and therefore it fails to com-municate the power of the story as fully as it might.His effort to preserve the letter of the original fails topreserve the spirit; it does not convey the emotionalpower and function of the original because it fails tocommunicate even literally to the modern reader.

Our Editorial Procedures

The balance of this paper is our edited version of theShotridge's English composition. Here are some of thegeneral procedures we have followed in the revision:

1. We have kept the gems of "poetic diction"wherever they are "poetic" but not obscure. Forexample "foliage moon." We like this so muchthat we have added a few of our own, such asthe buds "puckering," which conveys the themeof the Tlingit verb.

2. Most of Shotridge's parenthetical notes areincorporated into the main text, especially wherethey explain the "poetic diction"; for example"the month of May" in the opening line. Some ofhis comments are relegated to notes, and wehave added some notes of our own.

3. All archaic English nouns, directionals, andlocationals are replaced with modern English.

Thus "girdle" becomes "belt," and all the hithers,thithers, and whences are dropped. The "drift logwith spurs of queer genus," which borders onbombast, becomes "a drift log with an unusualkind of spur." It sounds more pedestrian, butclear.

4. Where the word order is unnatural or unclear,it is changed. "To follow that river big" becomes"to follow that big river."

5. Anything that creates linguistic confusion isedited and in extreme cases paraphrased.

6. Generally translators do not translate personalnames such as Eagle Head, but Shotridge did,and we have left them as is. Shotridge also playswith ethnonyms: Tlingit, meaning "human," andCunanaa, meaning Athapaskan but literally"other," or "alien," which now conveys all kinds ofsci-fi associations. Technically, "alien" as anEnglish word comes from the Latin for "other."

Here is an example of a passage we edited: "Care-fully that man looked and felt, then to the camp andto comrades he told. Right away with him they wentthither." This becomes: "Carefully the man looked at itand felt it. Then he returned to camp to tell the rest ofthem. Right away they went back there with him."

This review of examples illustrates Eugene Nida'sidea of levels of "transfer" (Nida 1964:184-92). He iden-tifies literal transfer, minimal transfer, and literary trans-fer. "Literal transfer" is word-for-word, whereas "mini-mal transfer" is whatever is necessary to make accept-able sense in the target language: for example, adding"a" or "the" in English when translating from languagesthat have no articles, such as Russian or Tlingit. In Nida'scontext, it seems that Shotridge confused the literaland minimal transfers. His style is optional and oper-ates at the level of literary transfer; his grammar is notoptional and exemplifies the minimal transfer.

We should note that the division of the narrativeinto sub-sections with titles is not in the Shotridgeoriginal, but is a preferred publishing conventiontoday, and one that we hope will be of help toreaders in following the story and possibly tracingits route.

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"Ghost of Courageous Adventurer,"

[Translated from Tlingit oral tradition by Louis Shotridge(1920), edited by Nora Marks Dauenhauer (1997)]

Opening Frame

It was May, the foliage moon, the month when budsare puckering on trees, when the Shangukeidi laid theirpacks in canoes and poled away to lands unknown.They weren't many. Maybe they numbered twenty men.Among them was Eagle Head. They steered their ca-noes toward TIeheeni, a branch of the Chilkat River. Atraveler never took this stream too far inland becausea glacier grew there, shutting off their passage.

From Sea Level to Timber line

The canoes of cottonwood moved on and on. Nowthey pole and now they tow. Through ice water wadethe bare feet of those brave men of long ago. Thecommon cold was unknown in those days. Where didthe man of today come from to be so soft? Regard-less of all protection he catches cold.

One camp ahead they reached Trout Creek, acrossfrom where the town of Porcupine now is. Here thecanoes were beached, turned upside down, andwrapped with underbrush. "Maybe we'll be luckyand make our return through here." Though the trailof the sun was still long, they didn't go any fartherthat day, for as always on such a journey, little thingsmust be fitted together, retying packs so they lay bet-ter on backs. Staffs, too, were always made to fit thehands. Thus, they always made camp there at the ca-noe landing.

As the sky turned gray at dawn, faces passedthrough loops of pack straps. Those packs of foodwere heavy. Trout Creek Mountain was steep. The jour-ney moved in that direction, without eating breakfast,because the tongue was still coated. How different isthe man of today. Eat first and work next. But with theman of long ago it was work first, and with sunrisecomes time for breakfast. Food eaten before the tongueis cleared, they say, was unwholesome to the stom-

ach. It was when the sun was sliding down that thejourney climbed to the timberline. Their guess was right.The next trees were far away from here, so the journeymade camp.

Chilkat Summit; O'Connor and Tatshenshini Rivers

Then from that place, while it was still dark, theymounted the journey again. When the sunbeams low-ered their feet to the base of the mountain, the expe-dition had reached the summit. They made a fire fortheir lunch stop. When they had finished eating, thegroup continued, following the short cut called De-spondent Man's Trail, that ran from the prairie to ChilkatPass. The expedition moved on and on. At times thenew trail was good, and sometimes bad. In hollowsthe old snow was melting slowly and retarded theirtravel without snowshoes.

After two camps in that direction, no more treeswere seen, only a low growth of willows here andthere. From the summit of Chilkat Pass there is a stretchof rolling land of about forty miles, a divide betweenthe timber line of the Tlingit forest and the interior.

Maybe six camps from home, the group came to abig river. Now people call it Alsek (Tatshenshini).' Fromthere they moved downriver along the shore. Twocamps in that direction, they thought they might betoo far down. From piles of driftwood they draggedlogs and right away they lashed together a raft. This ishow they gained the far side of the river. From therethe group went westward.

Following the Ice Field to Yakutat

One camp from the river, the group came to the faceof a glacier. Looking north and south, they couldn'tsee the end. Their guess was right: that growth of icewas wide. Where should the journey go? To the ocean,one would think. It was from there that a traveler hadformerly come. The expedition had wandered ontothe route that strangers had taken home.^ The groupstopped to camp at the timber line of the glacier. Thatevening the men agreed on a certain course.

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When the Big Dipper [Yaxte; Great Bear] was turn-ing over to daybreak, they were already walking onthe glacier. In the cool of dawn, it was firm underfoot.But as the sun rose higher, the firm surface began tomelt, and fear crept in. But ready was the rope of theman of long ago. It was strong, made from the hindquarter of mountain goat. It was tied to the leader'swaist and stretched through the hands of all the men.

Far ahead of them, side by side, stood two moun-tains, (Seattle and Ruhamah). In between them lookedgood. They kept their faces moving that direction. EagleHead was in the lead. It was slow going, they say,because of many crevices. Even though the mountainslooked quite near, when night fell they still were farahead. At night, it was like a tanned skin underfoot,with less precaution needed for each step. Twilight layover the icefield and it was clear to the men where thedanger lay. No one had making camp to rest in mind,and the line moved on throughout the night.

Those travelers of long ago stood in the haze ofdawn. They looked up to the face of the mountain onthe north side, and then up to the face of the mountainon the south. It was Chaan Yuka, Midway of the IceField called Chaan. From that time on this name, givenby those men of long ago, was fixed in our language.No one knows what language the name is borrowedfrom. [Probably the Athabaskan name had been ap-plied to these mountains in more ancient time, and thename made more widely recognized only since theTlingit discovery—NMD].

On went the journey till the mountains with thenight were left behind.^ The sun was falling into itsslide when the sound of a great drum reached themen's ears. The wind was down, and through the stillair louder and louder came that thunder-like drummingas they traveled on. It was the ocean, the great saltwater, beating its arms against the shore in waves.When they recognized the sound, relief swept throughtheir heart and limbs, and their pace increased. The sunhad taken its last steep slide when the group came tocamp among the first timber. There was no courage

N. M, DAURENHAUER AND R. DAUENHAUER

left in anyone to go farther; sleep had overpoweredcourage.

How much sleep had they taken when each mansquatted into his pack straps and rushed off to followthe first to leave camp? Maybe joy was what they felt.What did each expect from where the sound was reach-ing their ears? It's always this way: a little change in ahard experience brings a feeling like berries to themouth—for a while it's good, but soon the taste meltsaway. The sun was half way along its trail when thegroup came to a lake. Where is this? They thought itwas a lake, but it was really Yakutat Bay. Until the tidewent out, they had no idea they had come to theshore of the ocean. The sun had sunk behind a moun-tain when the group arrived at the lip of the waves.Against the shoreline, up and down, the great salt watermoved its arms. But there was no sign of human habi-tation. Where were those feelings of joy now? Likespruce pitch from a tree, slowly, they melted away.

Malaspina Glacier

After this, their feet, just like their feelings, became heavy,too. They camped one night. With pointed words, theydisagreed. What kind of a man was strong willedenough to continue? So one speech went against an-other. It is said that Eagle Head, that real man, whilehumming a little tune to himself, pushed and drew anawl through his moccasin patch. They say that EagleHead's little humming was an omen of the anger in hisheart. Speaking slowly, he said, "You sound to me likehomesick children. Did you come here for fun? Turn inyour tracks now if you choose, before it gets any harder.As for me, my feeling is not to turn my face homewardempty handed." It was then the men realized theirshame and how they were discouraged and disheart-ened. Once more courage pierced their weak hearts.But in camp on the edge of another glacier (probablythe Malaspina Glacier) this talk continued. There arefew men with courage enough to blame them. Maybethey too, even these courageous few, would haveweakened had they stood there face to face with this

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glacier with its end unknown.'' Toward dawn the ex-pedition moved along on the glacier. They say thiswas even more dangerous, since the crevices weremany and bigger. On and on slowly, the expeditionmoved. Had two young men taken more care, no griefwould have come to the travelers. Maybe their mindswandered away from thoughts of caution. From this,the first two deaths occurred among them. Theyfell into ice crevices. This is the way it always is: aman may take much care, but his time to die ig-nores that care.

Who was to blame for these lost lives? No onedared to say the way he felt about what happened.They feared the words of Eagle Head. The travelers satin meditation. Maybe some minds vacillated and de-cided now one way and then the other, but no onethere was strong enough to turn back. While the trav-elers sat with troubled hearts. Eagle Head snatched hispack strap and said, "Let's keep going. Is it somethingnew to you that a man should die?" With this remarkhe started to walk. One by one the men slowly movedafter the leader. There was trouble underfoot, but inspite of everything, the heart of Eagle Head neveryielded. How strong the heart of that man must havebeen. Maybe it was like European steel from peoplebeyond the horizon; it never bent. It took them twodays and one night to reach the other side of the gla-cier. From there, once again the expedition movedalong the wave-lip shoreline.

Following the Shoreline; the Discovery of Iron

After making camp, one of the men was walking alongthe shore. Unless there was something that needed tobe done, the traveler of long ago never kept still or sataround in camp. What was he looking for? It was todrive away the tiredness that created such a habit. Hewas walking not too far from camp. There, across hispath, lay a drift log with an unusual kind of spur. Theman had never seen such spurs. From his belt, thatman of long ago drew out his adze. What could beharder than this green stone?^ Therefore, little did that

man of long ago take care. He struck the unusualgrowth with all his strength. "Dummm" the sound cameout. What was it that had such a sound, and what didit mean? The edge of that hard, green-stone adzehad broken off, with only a bright spot where it hadslipped on the spur. "My adze—so much dependedon you," he said in amazement. For a moment, troublepierced his mind, but the thought of the unusual logwas stronger.

Maybe then came to mind for the man of long agothat something lay at hand superior to his green-stone.For some moments the man contemplated the un-usual log. Then he rolled it over. More of the spurswere sticking out. Carefully the man looked at it andfelt it. Then he returned to camp to tell the rest ofthem. Right away they went back there with him. Theycarried the log to camp. First they pounded on it withrocks. No, these unusual spurs only bent. "What will firedo to it?" They laid the unusual log on the fire, and onit lay all eyes. Behold! Before their eyes the log burned,but what they thought were spurs only turned likered-hot coals. Thus, through a drift log, iron was car-ried to the hands of the Tlingit.

To the Copper River

In late summer, when the Coho salmon were swim-ming, one by one, in streams to shore, the expedi-tion reached the bank of a large river. Maybe it'sthe one now called the Copper. Here their mindsvacillated, deciding now to cross the river and con-tinue on along the ocean shore, and now to followthe river upstream. Camping at the same place onenight after another. Eagle Head slept through allthose days. Never were his feelings heard from hislips. Maybe now his strong heart and courage werebending a little. No one can say what luck will favorany man's effort.

They don't say how many days it was that they'dbeen camping in this one place when smoke wassighted toward away upriver. "Aliens. Gunanaa," some-one said.*^ They wanted to make certain, but no one

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said anything. Whoever happened to be near hispack squatted to put it on, and with one accord theymade a run toward the smoke. The smoke appearedclose, but in spite of their haste, night fell before theyreached it. But it was not too dark, and they could seethe way ahead clearly. Where did the depression go?Excitement overwhelmed it, and onward rushed thehurried feet.

Up the Copper River: Encountering the Athapasi<ans

The travelers came out from behind a point, andright before their eyes lay many fires. It looked like along row of houses, maybe a sizeable town. Maybethey never scented all that smoke because thebreeze was blowing away from them. The travelerswere still some distance away when the dogs be-gan to bark at them. On the opposite side of thestream from the town, the travelers quietly halted.From out of the village came forth a voice. Maybe itmeant, "Who are you?" No one was there to tell themwhat the strange language had said. "We are hu-man—^Tlingit—and we seek your presence." Likewise,they failed to understand the person from another place.While they hesitated to wade across, the fires were allextinguished. Alien people, always, like wild animals,are shy. Above the swishing sound of the running streamthey could hear talking at night. Infants in cradles werecrying. There was nothing else the travelers could dobut to wait for daylight. The people they had searchedout were afraid of them.

Gradually night faded away, and dawn opened ona large camp with a long row of brush houses. Pres-ently, one by one, smoke rose from within each dwell-ing. It was Eagle Head who came out to the streamedge. He gestured to the people across, and one byone those new people assembled. In front of themstood their headman, who likewise talked by gesturesto the travelers. He only exchanged a few words, andwhen he was finished, they talked among each other.They all seemed happy. Then the travelers were sum-moned to come over.

Trading with theAthapasl<ans

The Tlingit waded across and walked among the alientribe. To this day we still walk toward a place in thesame manner. The travelers were surrounded in theopen, and strange eyes were on them. Maybe theywere curious to those eyes. From among the crowd,their leader emerged. Likewise Eagle Head steppedforward to meet him, and face-to-face stood the Tlingitand the man of the alien tribe. Gesturing, they acknowl-edged each other. Presently, from his pouch, the Tlingitbrought out his daadzi for him to see (a fire-makingapparatus of flint and pyrites - NMD). With it was sometinder of shredded cedar root. Before the eyes of thealien people a fire began to blaze from a spark. For amoment there was silence, and then confusion ofvoices. The alien people were amazed. After demon-strating his daadzi, Eagle Head placed it in its pouchand then offered it to the alien man. "I brought this foryou, my friend." With these words he placed the fire-making set in the hands of the alien man. Those inlandpeople used a wooden drill to make fire. In return, theleader lifted his quiver of arrows from his shoulder, andwith his bow gave it to Eagle Head. This is how thegreetings of the Tlingit and the alien were expressedwith gifts.

No longer was there a feeling of suspicion. Beforefeasting there, those alien people lined up to dance forthe travelers, according to their custom. They greetfriendship with dance. Do they put on special make-up for dance, as we do? Not at all. Those nomads—whoever happens to be near, some maybe with packsof infants—move, just as they are, into dancing themoment a song is started. Happy are they, these in-land people. Though all the dangers of man wereknown to them, life among them was peaceful. Whydo the Tlingit not learn this good life? How bad it musthave been on our ancestor for his offspring only to bethe antagonist to another man. Maybe we were both-ered first, and then we struck back hard at the otherman.'

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It is not told how long they camped with the alienpeople. All through their stay, of course, they went onexchanging things. Everything the travelers had wentas gifts in return for the many things the alien peoplegave them. It was at that time that walrus tusk ivorywas given to the Tlingit, which, up to that time, likethe iron, was unknown to them.

The people the travelers met in that camp pointedto still other people, (probably Eskimo - NMD) livingfurther to the west, and told them that this was themeeting and trading point.* Maybe it was at that timethe Tlingit came to know of copper, but we don'tknow. It was from that region, in later years, that weacquired copper.

Returning to Klukwan

It was autumn, when the cottonwood trees had turnedyellow, when a warning cry of the return approach ofthe Chaan Yuka travelers was heard in Klukwan. Theircanoes drifted in front of the town. When the canoescame ashore there, only a very few of those mencame home. The missing had fallen along the way.To some person a son, to another a husband, or per-haps a father, too, was missing. That was a momentof sorrow. From the different parts of the village, onlycries of grief were heard.

In his canoe stood Eagle Head. Never before in hismanhood did his voice tremble. Maybe sorrow enteredhis strong heart from above, when he called out thosenames, one by one, of the brave men who fell alongthe way. From the beginning it was this way. Onlythrough sacrifice does man acquire something of value.It was at the cost of brave lives that we now have inour hands those objects that constitute our pride.

Forging of the Dagger from tine Iron; CeremonialDebut of the Dagger; Oratory; Naming and Pass-ing of the Dagger

It is not known how long after that they had thispiece of iron. Until Kaa.ushti, a war leader of the Kaag-waantaan rose in his maternal uncle's stead, it was

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never brought into view. During his possession it wasfirst formed like a war knife. When first completed, itwas not as you see it now. Only after we came tohave grindstones was its rough surface made smooth.The ivory head, however, was never changed. It's justthe way it was first made.

It was during a Kaagwaantaan encounter withT'ikanaa, a Tlingit division occupying the southwestcoast of Prince of Wales Island, that the knife was fin-ished The man of long ago always did a thing like thisat the right time. Thus it was in wartime this knife wasawarded. One day a messenger went from house tohouse, announcing "Kaa.ushti is calling all his clansmento the Finned House."

When all were seated in his clan house, that greatwarrior stood before the people. "You men of Nees.adi,Shangukeidi, and Kaagwaantaan, I desire your support.Without you, what can I accomplish? At this moment Icall on you to confirm the desires of those men inwhose place I stand before you. From the moment itwas told to me, not once did the deed performed inconfirmation of the noblest claim by those men whogave their lives in the Chaan Yuka journey ever leavemy mind. My heart feels good that it has fallen to meto bring out the object of concern on the minds ofthose men whom I have succeeded." When their mindswere set at ease. Eagle Head stood up and spoke,"Only our ghosts have returned to you, you children ofShangukeidi." From that time on, people never forgothis remark.

At the end of his speech, that great warrior drewforth from its sheath this knife, called "Denizen of Un-seen World."'° It was Kaa.ushti who pronounced thename. With outstretched hand he lifted it and calledhim, saying, "Eagle Head, take it. In your hands shallrest the memories of those brave men." Eagle Headcame forward from the group. He was all bent over,his eyesight, too, was very short; old age had over-come him. "Kaagwaantaan! I can only offer acceptancein this old age. Only in my dream will it be my post. Ifonly this moment had come while I was young! I take

PARTICIPANTS/ LOUIS SHOTRIDCE

this knife only to pass it through these old hands, Ithink, to hands of greater power." In this way the knifepassed to the Shangukeidi.

Thus it was the remark made by the courageousadventurer that inspired the artist who made an imageof the name" as the pommel of the war knife, and asnearly as the Tlingit idea can be interpreted in English,the name of the knife is The Ghost of Courageous Ad-venturer.

Conclusion

We hope that this newly edited translation is faithful toShotridge's intention to show the greatness of Tlingit,and will in fact help convey it by removing his mean-ingful work of almost 80 years ago from relative ob-scurity and placing it in the linguistic mainstream for anew generation of readers.

The example of his style shows us how languagechanges. The example of his life's work shows us howattitudes can change as well. Milburn summarizes, "ToShotridge and others of his era, preservation and rep-resentation were key factors in seeking institutionalsanctuary for objects, while today, control over repre-sentation and possession are the issues that dominateNative American peoples' concerns. ...What emergesfrom this discussion is a realization of the historicallycontingent and politically charged nature of posses-sion and interpretation and its long and complex his-tory among the Northwest Coast peoples" (Milburn1997:347).

We are all part of that history, and as we judgethose who have gone before us, so will we be judgedby those who will come after us. We are dealing withthe same issues as Louis Shotridge, but almost a cen-tury later. His concern was recording the greatness ofthe Tlingit clans through their visual art documented inthe fullest context possible. Our concerns are more forrecording the Tlingit language and the classics of Tlingitoral literature composed and published orally in thatliterature. It is perhaps indicative that we focus onShotridge's writing here, as an example of his success.

We believe that Milburn is correct in her conclusionthat Northwest Coast art has always beencontextualized politically, and that the context changesfrom generation to generation. Back in Shotridge's time("Then"), it was politically correct to assimilate to West-ern culture, and to remove traditional art from the com-munity. Now it is seemingly "politically correct" to de-mand that art back, with the demands often couchedin confrontational terms. Then, the Tlingit language wasnot in danger; now it is, with fewer than 600 speakersremaining today, most of whom are above the age offifty, it is similarly politically correct these days to de-mand "the language" back, as if it were an object keptin a vault or in a display case, rather than a living pro-cess and relationship. Languages are not like objectsof art, and the dynamics of loss and restoration are farmore complex.

We would like to conclude with two quotationsfrom the letters of Louis Shotridge, in some small wayto link our work in general and this paper in particularto his legacy. In 1923, Shotridge wrote, "It is now clearthat unless someone goes to work to record theseold things as evidence, the noble idea of our forefa-thers shall be entirely lost" (Louis Shotridge to GeorgeGordon,January 27, 1923; Milburn 1997:345). We sub-scribe to this, even today, and especially today. In thisspirit, we also edit Shotridge's composition of 1920,which has now joined its place among the "old things."In 1932, in his farewell words to the University of Penn-sylvania Museum, Shotridge wrote, "I hope that in thefuture the old Tlingit objects will always have a fairchance in representing their former masters" (LouisShotridge to Horace Jayne, January 18, 1932; Milburn1997:346). We hope that our small editorial effort willhelp to keep this fair chance going.

Acknowledgments

We express our debt to Maureen Milburn, who hasbeen researching and writing about Louis Shotridgefor over 1 5 years (Milburn 1 986, 1994, 1997). We haverelied heavily on her unpublished Ph.D. dissertation

N. M. DAURENHAUER AND R. DAUENHAUER

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(Milburn 1997) for historical and archival informationon Shotridge. This is the most definitive study on thisissue, and it is indispensable for anyone interested inShotridge's life and work. We also thank Judith Bermanfor her comments and support, and the staff of theUniversity of Pennsylvania Museum in Philadelphia fortheir assistance in securing illustrations.

Notes

1. What some older travel accounts call theAlsek River is now called the Tatshenshini River.Sometime since the turn of the twentieth century,the major river names used in the early travel ac-counts have all "rotated" one position counter-clock-wise to the northwest on modern maps. The name"Alsek" no longer refers to the Tatshenshini, but nowrefers to both to the Upper Alsek River, which re-quires a helicopter portage to navigate, and to theLower Alsek River which flows into the Pacific atDry Bay. The Shotridge reference to Alsek is nowcalled the Tatshenshini, which flows into the Alsekand continues to the coast as the Lower Alsek River.What was formerly called the Tatshenshini is nowcalled the Blanchard River, and is a tributary of theTatshenshini River joining it shortly above the usualput-in spot for rafters at Dalton Post, Shawshe inSouthern Tutchone. One possible route for the jour-ney Shotridge is describing was for the group tofollow the drainage of what is now called theO'Connor River and to cross the Tatshen-shini Riverbelow the confluence. On the famous Kohklux mapdrawn in 1852 (Davidson 1901:76; de Laguna1972:88; Kohklux 1995:15) there is a dotted linelabeled "reported trail" connecting the headwatersof the Tklaheenae (TIeheeni) River and "Sticks Vil-lage," an Athapaskan village on the east bank ofthe All-Segh (Alsek = Tatshenshini) River, north ofthe confluence of the O'Connor River. The travelershead down river on foot. There are several points inthis section of the river where they could havecrossed to the west bank and to the ice fields. Theyprobably went westward on the ice from this sec-tion of the river and not after the confluence withthe Alsek, which would be more than a two-dayhike. The trekkers presumably crossed the AlsekRiver over an ice bridge. Glaciers and ice fieldscovered rivers in places, and there are songs and

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stories in Tlingit oral tradition about people comingdown rivers under the ice. Alternatively, their routecould have been over what is the Novatak glacieron modern maps, below the confluence of the Alsekand Tatshenshini Rivers. This is now the inland sideof the Alaskan Glacier Bay National Park, and a re-gion of dramatic ice movement. All of these gla-ciers are part of the same larger ice field, and how-ever the hikers ascended, they eventually used Mt.Ruhamah as a bearing. This mountain is also on theKohklux map and modern maps. It is near RussellFjord, an area of spectacular glacial advance in re-cent years.

2. Other travel. Shotridge noted: "It is evidentit was this bit of vague information, which occa-sionally, had been heard in Chilkat as passed onfrom no known authority, that convinced these mento be all the more determined in their purpose topenetrate into the unknown country" (Shotridge1 920:1 7). By the time of Russian contact in the late1 700s, there was established travel between Chilkatand Yakutat. Traveling in 1 788, Izmailov andBocharov noted that they met people in Yakutatwho were from Chilkat (Shelikov 1 981:94); but it isunclear if they traveled between Chilkat and Yakutatby land or sea. River travel between Dalton Postand Dry Bay was well established (de Laguna1972:85-90). The present story treats the legend-ary time of first exploration of the route, but sug-gests that even these early travelers suspected theywere not the first to use the route.

3. Light. It is now approaching midsummer,and the trekkers are facing the land of the midnightsun; the sun is gradually moving to the north, wherethe sky will appear red all night, and night is literallyin the south, behind them.

4. Malaspina Glacier, of today's map. The origi-nal is ambiguous here: literally "at this moment." Wetake the reference as not to the men at this mo-ment in the story, but to Shotridge's audience ofreaders in the present time frame. Possibly he meantboth. Who among us is to say that he or she wouldn'tweaken at the thought of continuing when facedwith the awesome sight of the Malaspina Glacier.This glacier is larger than the entire state of RhodeIsland. There are historical accounts from the Rus-sian period by an officer named Tarkhanov whoaccompanied the Yakutat Tlingit over that glacierto the Copper River.

PARTICIPANTS/ LOUIS SHOTRIDGE

5. Green Stone (probably jade). The pre-con-tact adze or axe was made of stone. Accordingto Tlingit traditional accounts (including this story)the first metal was found in driftwood from Euro-pean ships. After contact, steel axes replacedstone, and the technology of Northwest coastwood carving was revolutionized. The Tlingit ob-tained native copper from the interior, notablyfrom the Copper River, and indigenous techniquesevolved for working it.

6. Athapaskan Indians. The Tlingit term isCunanaa, meaning "alien" or "other tribe." The origi-nal is: "Cunanah" [alien tribe] man said. In the nextparagraph, the original is: "Tlingit [human] we are,it is thy presence we seek." As with many otherethnonyms around the world, the Tlingit word forthemselves is Lingi't, meaning "human."

7. "Happy Athapaskans". Shotridge seems tobe indulging in some romantic stereotyping hereabout the idyllic life of primitive people in con-trast to the warlike tendencies of the sophisti-cated people of the coast.

8. The reference here is most probably tothe Chugach or Pacific Eskimo, also called Alutiiqor Sugpiaq. This passage is ambiguous and weare guessing and paraphrasing that the aliens arenot telling the Tlingit of yet another separate placewhere they can meet and trade with the Eskimo,but rather that this is the same trading spot wherethe Tlingit found the Athapaskan. Shotridge'soriginal is, "The people found in that camppointed to still other people [probably Eskimo]living farther on [westward], and meeting pointit was where they were found" (Shotridge1920:25—brackets are Shotridge's). The "aliens"were probably either Eyak or Ahtna. Presumably,this is their trading spot. The reference to brushhouses indicates a temporary camp rather thana permanent village.

9. Precise clan identification of the T'ikanaais unclear. The term is unique here, and means"the tribe on the outer or seaward side of theisland," from t'ika (outer, seaward) and naa (tribe).The Nees.adi, Shangukeidf, and Kaagwaantaanare clans of the Eagle moiety. The host,Kaa.ushti, makes a speech alluding to the de-parted leaders of his clan. At the end of thepassage. Eagle Head responds and addresses"Children of Shangukeidf." This term is normally

used when a person of one moiety is addressingpeople of the opposite moiety whose fathers areof the speaker's clan. Thus, this phrase makessense only if members of the Raven moiety werepresent as witnesses to the passing of the knifeby Kaa.ushti of the Kaagwaantaan to the Shangu-keidf. The Finned House is also the house groupof Louis Shotridge, so listeners and readers knowthat his clan and house passed the dagger on tothe Shangukeidf. It is important to note here thatthe story does not end with adventure and thereturn of the explorers, but with the creation, his-tory, and social contextualization of the art ob-ject that alludes to that adventure. This part ofthe narrative structure is very important in Tlingitoral tradition and to Shotridge's efforts at con-textualization.

10. "The Denizen of Unseen World" is pre-sumably a spirit or a ghost, an inhabitant of thespirit world. We have not heard the orginial nameof the dagger in Tlingit, but Shotridge calls it "Deni-zen of Unseen World" or "as near as Tlingit ideacan be interpreted in English, the "Ghost of Cou-rageous Adventurer" (Shotridge 1920:21) Pass-ing the knife to Eagle Head, a participant of theoriginal journey, also identifies it with him andhis spirit.

1 1 . We added the word "image" toShotridge's translation—cf. his original text, "art-ist who fashioned the name of the war knife onthe Pommel" (Shotridge 1920:26). We take thisnot as written inscription, but use of the artisticimage and design of the death's head—the spiritor ghost. The story illustrates how an art objectbecomes at.oow, an object purchased with thelives of ancestors, in this case the courageous ad-venturers who died on the expedition. The ob-ject is made, brought out ceremonially, and passedon to new stewards. Along with the memoriesand spirits of the original men who lost their livesand all the previous stewards of the object, EagleHead, who survived the journey but who will dieand join the spirit world, becomes included amongthose whose spirits are remembered by the ob-ject, and who are typically recalled in ceremonialoratory, for examples of such traditional orato-ries connecting and contextualizing individualsand the art objects (see Dauenhauer and Dauenhauer1990:229-323).

N. M. DAURENHAUER AND R. DAUENHAUER

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1907 Notes on the Blanket Designs, to Emmons1907:351-400. Reprinted in: Jonaitis 1995:188-247.

1917 Grammatical Notes on the Language of the TlingitIndians. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Mu-seum.

Carpenter, Edmund

1975 Collecting Northwest Coast Art. In Ameri-can Indian Art of the Northwest Coast: A Dialogon Craftmanship and Aesthetics. Bill Holm and BillReid, eds. Pp. 9-27. Seattle: University of Wash-ington Press.

Cole, Douglas

1985 Captured Heritage: the Scramble forNorthwest Coast Artifacts. Seattle: University ofWashington Press.

Dauenhauer, Nora Marks

1986 Context and Display in Northwest CoastArt. Voices of First America: Text and Contestin the New World. Special Issue of New Scholar10:419-32.

1995 Tlingit At.oow: Tradition and Concepts. InThe Spirit Within: Northwest Coast Native Art fromthe John H. Hauberg Collection. Abbott, Brown,Price, and Thurman, eds. Seattle: Seattle ArtMuseum.

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1 987 Haa Shukd, our Ancestors: Tlingit oral Narra-tives. Seattle: University of Washington Press.

1 990 Haa Tuwundagu Yis, for Healing our Spirit:Tlingit Oratory. Seattle: University of WashingtonPress.

1 994 Haa Kusteeyf, Our Culture: Tlingit Life Stories.

Seattle: University of Washington Press.Davidson, George

1901 Explanation of an Indian Map of the Rivers,Lakes, Trails and Mountains from the Chilkaht to theYukon drawn by the Chilkaht Chief, Kohklux, in 1869.Mazama 2{2):7S-82.

De Laguna, Frederica

1 972 Under Mount Saint Elias. The History and Cul-ture of the Yakutat Tlingit. Smithsonian Contributionsto Anthropology, vol. 7, pts.1-3. Washington, DC:Smithsonian Institution Press.

Emmons, George T.

1 907 The Chilkat Blanket. Memoirs of the Ameri-can Museum of Natural History, vol. 3, pt. 4, pp.329-350.

Halpin, Marjorle Myers

1994 A Critique of the Boasian Paradigm for North-west Coast Art. Culture XIV (1 ):5-l 6.

Hymes, Dell

1985 Language, Memory, and Selective Performance:Cultee's Kathlamet Sun's Myth as Twice-Told toBoas. Journal of American Folklore 98(390):391-434.

Jonaitis, Aldona, ed.

1995 A Wealth of Thought. Franz Boas on Native Ameri-can Art. Seattle and London: University of Wash-ington Press. Vancouver and Toronto: Couglas andMclntyre.

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1 995 The Kohklux Map. Whitehorse: Yukon Histori-cal and Museums Association.Mason, J. Alden

1 960 Louis Shotridge. Expedition 2:1 0-1 6.Maud, Ralph

1 993 The Porcupine Hunter and other Stories. TheOriginal Tsimshian Texts of Henry Tate. Vancouver:Talonbooks.

n.d. "The War of the Ghosts:" Two Tellings by CharlesCultee to Franz Boas, 1891 and 1894. Manuscriptin a yet-untiteld and unpublished collection ofpapers on Northwest Coast literature edited byRichard and Nora Dauenhauer.

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1 986 Louis Shotridge and the Objects of Everlast-ing Esteem. In Raven's Journey. Susan Kaplan andKristin Barsness, eds. Pp. 54-90. Philadelphia: Uni-versity of Pennsylvania Press.

1994 Weaving the 'Tina' Blanket: the Journey ofFlorence and Louis Shotridge. In Haa Kusteeyf, OurCulture: Tlingit Life Stories. Nora Marks Dauenhauerand Richard Dauenhauer. Pp. 549-64. Seattle:University of Washington Press.

1 997 Politics of Possession: Louis Shotridge and theTlingit Collections of the University Museum. Unpub-lished Ph.D. Thesis in Anthropology. University ofBritish Columbia, Vancouver, B. C. The edition citedin this paper is Draft 4, February 1 6, 1 997.

Nida, Eugene A.

1 964 Toward a Science of Translating. Leiden: E. J.

Brill.Price, Sally

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1969 The Ethnography of Franz Boas. Letters andDiaries of Franz Boas written on the Northwest Coastfrom 1886 to 1931. Chicago: University of Chi-cago Press.

Shelikov, Georgii

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Shotridge, Florence

191 3 The Life of a Chilkat Indian Girl. The MuseumJournal. University of Pennsylvania Museum 4:101-3.Shotridge, Louis

1920 Ghost of Courageous Adventurer. The MuseumJournal. Universityof Pennsylvania Museum 11(1):11-26.

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1908 Social Conditions, Beliefs, and LinguisticRelationship of theTlingit Indians. Twenty-Sixth An-nual Report of the Bureau of American Ethnologyforthe Years 1904-1905, pp. 391-512. Washing-ton, DC: Government Printing Office.

N. M. DAURENHAUER AND R. DAUENHAUER

^iiinguai/'£)icuiturai Interpreters andInformants of the Jesup Expedition ra

SERGEI KAN

Much of the writing on the Jesup North Pacific Expedi-tion ONPE) (e.g., Freed et. al. 1988, 1 997;Jonaitis 1 988;Krupnikand Fitzhugh 2001) as well as a number of theessays in this volume which celebrates the expedition'scentennial, inevitably focus on its organizers and spon-sors and, especially, on its field ethnographers. Afterall, they are the ones who collected the data soughtby Boas and whose names appear in the JNPE publica-tions. Our research on the lives and scholarly contribu-tions of these ethnographers is obviously made easierby the availability of substantial biographical materi-als, published and archival (see Al'kor 1935; Codere1959; Cole 1999; Rohner 1969; Kan 1992, 2000,2001a; Krupnik 1996; Shavrov 1935; Stocking 1974,1996; Vakhtin 2001; Vdovin 1991; Wickwire 1993).

However, as the present paper as well as severalother essays in this volume demonstrate, we couldachieve a much better understanding of theexpedition's contribution to circumpolar ethnology bypaying serious attention to these ethnographers' localinformants, interpreters, research assistants, and col-laborators (see chapters by Dauenhauer and Dauen-hauer, and by Wickwire, this volume).

At the turn of the twentieth century, when the JNPEvolumes were being put together, most anthropolo-gists did not bother to include much information ontheir local interpreters and Native as well as non-Na-tive consultants, considering it to be irrelevant to schol-arship. In the context of the JNPE, the only exceptionsto this rule were, of course, James Teit (see Wickwire,

this volume) and Boas' long-term collaborator and col-league, the great Kwakwaka'wakw ethnographer,George Hunt (Cannizzo 1983; Jacknis 1991; Berman1996, 2001; Webster this volume), whose name ap-pears next to Boas' as the co-author of the KwakiutITexts (Boas and Hunt 1905, 1906). While Hunt's roleas theJNPE's key Native participant is unique, a num-ber of other Native American and "mixed-blood" (Cre-ole, Metis) interpreters, amateur ethnographers, and in-formants played a major role in collecting and makingsense of this and related expeditions' voluminous data(see Wickwire 1993; cf. Milburn 1 986; Dauenhauer andDauenhauer 1994, this volume).'

In recent decades many practicing cultural anthro-pologists as well as historians of anthropology havebecome interested in the interaction and the relation-ship between the ethnographer and his or her infor-mant as the context within which "ethnographic data"is not only collected but, to some extent, constructed(see Buckley 1 989; Kan 2001 b). A number of scholarshave been referring to this interaction as a "dialogue"(Dwyer 1977; Tedlock 1979). As Clifford and Marcus(1986:15) have pointed out, "In this view, 'culture' isalways relational, an inscription of communicative pro-cesses that exist, historically, tefween subjects in rela-tions of power."

Like many other ethnographers of theirtime,JNPEexpedition fieldworkers, with the exception of Bogorasamong the Chukchi (Bogoras 1904-9); Jochelsonamong the Sakha (Yakut) (but not among the Koryak,

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cf. Jochelson 1 908, 1 926); Hunt (Boas and Hunt 1 905,1906) and Teit (1 900), were not fluent in the local Na-tive languages. Therefore, they had to rely on bilingualinterpreters and informants who could speak at leastsome English or Russian.-^ Such interpreters or culturalbrokers, as Karttunen (1994:xi) has suggested, "func-tioned as conduits through which information flowedbetween worlds in collision, translating more than justwords and bringing comprehensibility to otherwisemeaningless static".

I believe that by examining the biographies andthe ethnic/cultural background of these local partici-pants in JNPE we would not only gain a much deeperand more nuanced understanding of the nature andthe quality of the ethnography bequeathed to us byBoas and his colleagues but would also assign theseunnamed (or barely mentioned) men and women totheir proper place in the JNPE's annals.^

Jesup Expedition Ethnographers

Even a cursory examination of the ethnographic mono-graphs included in the JNPE series reveals how uneventheirquality really was. Some, like Bogoras' TheChukchee(1 904-9) or Teit's The Thompson Indians (1 900), weretrue classics of early twentieth century ethnology, cov-ering many of the major aspects of Native material,social, and spiritual culture. Other, such as Farrand'scollection of Chilcotin myths (Farrand 1 900) or Laufer'sbrief ethnography of the Amur River people (Laufer1 900), were rather disappointing.

The reasons for this disparity are quite obvious. Onthe one hand, we are dealing with very experiencedfield workers, like Waldemar Bogoras, a Russian eth-nographer who, prior to JNPE, had spent years livingamong the Chukchi and spoke their language (Kan1992; Krupnik 1996), or James Teit, a British expatriatewho had settled among the Thompson Indians (Nlaka'-pamux), married a Native woman and became fluentin NIaka'pamux (Wickwire 1993, this volume). Both ofthese men had already conducted some ethnographicresearch before they joined Boas' team.

On the other hand, there were some JNPE teammembers who were like Livingston Farrand. He wasnot an anthropologist by training, had ever conductedany fieldwork, nor had even visited American Indiansprior to his trip to the Northwest Coast in 1897. Tomake matters worse, he seemed to have trouble es-tablishing good rapport with the "Indians." Here, forexample, is what he said about his research amongthe Chilcotin: "The conditions were not particularly fa-vorable for the work, for the Indians were by no meanscordial at the outset, and good interpreters were notto be found. That great resource of ethnological workin the Northwest, the Chinook jargon, was also notavailable in this tribe" (1900:3-4)." Farrand did not faremuch better among the Quinault whom he visited dur-ing the summer, when most people had already leftfor their salmon fishing camps. In addition, many ofthose remaining behind had converted to Shakerism afew years prior to his visit and considered the old reli-gious traditions to be evil and not worth discussing.Luckily, Farrand located an elderly man who had re-fused to become a Shaker and was willing to talkabout the old culture. This man. Bob Pope, who wasdying of TB, became Farrand's main informant (Farrandand Kahnweiler 1 902:79; Jonatis 1988:191).

I would argue that if we could obtain biographicalinformation on this Quinault man, on Teit's Shuswapinformant Sixwilexken, orSwanton's Haida informantsand interpreters, such as Henry Edenshaw (Blackman1982), Mary Ridley, Walter McGregor and "Abraham,"^the ethnographic texts produced by these JNPE par-ticipants might tell us a lot more than they currentlydo.*' Similarly our understanding and appreciation ofBogoras' ethnography of the Chukchi and Jochelson'smonograph on the Koryak—JNPE's classic publica-tions—could be enhanced if researchers ever manageto figure out who their local informants and inter-preters were.'

To illustrate this argument 1 devote the rest ofthis paper to the discussion of a relatively short butrich account of certain key aspects of the nineteenth

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century Tlingit culture given in the 1 880s to GeorgeT. Emmons, the great "amateur" ethnographer of theTlingit, by his bilingual RussianATIingit informant, IvanZhukov.

George T. Emmons, Sergei I. Kostromitinov,and Ivan Zhukov

Although George T. Emmons (1852-1945), one of thecharacters in my story, was not a participant in theJNPE, his outstanding and voluminous ethnography ofthe Tlingit, both published and unpublished (see deLaguna 1991; Emmons 1991)** clearly complementedthe new information being collected by Boas and hisassociates. In fact, because of Boas' familiarity withEmmons' research in southeastern Alaska, this regionwas not the focus of the expedition's activities (Boas1903:77). This would also explain why Swanton'smonumental ethnography of the Haida (Swanton 1905)did appear as part of the JNPE publication serieswhile his two important works on the Tlingit did not(Swanton 1908, 1909).

Like Bogoras and Teit, Emmons spent years inter-acting with the Native people, learning their languageand studying their ways. Having come to southeast-ern Alaska in the early 1880s to serve on a Navy shipthat policed the area, he eventually became the majorauthority on Tlingit culture and the main collector ofTlingit artifacts (de Laguna 1991; Low 1991). He de-veloped good rapport with a number of Tlingit fami-lies, including that of Shaaduxicht (ca. 1819-89), thehead of the Finned House of the Kaagwaantaan clanand a powerful Chilkat leader; he was also the mater-nal grandfather of Louis Shotridge (Dauenhauer andDauenhauer 1994:549-51, this volume). The latter mayhave been the one to adopt the Navy officer into hislineage and clan. As Emmons himself put it, "I havevisited all of their villages. ... I have made a study oftheir history and I have lived with them on the mostintimate terms, until they have given me one of thetheir family names and look upon me as one of them-selves" (de Laguna 1991 :xvii).''

Emmons' most important work on the Tlingit, amonograph entitled The Tlingit Indians, which he beganworking on in the late 1880s, was never completedand languished in the AMNH archives until it was fi-nally published in 1991, after having been painstak-ingly edited by Frederica de Laguna.'" While puttingtogether this manuscript, Emmons not only relied onhis own observations and interviews but used a uniqueethnographic account, entitled A Glance at the FirstCustoms of the Tlingit or Kolosh as the Russians FoundThem at Sitka.^' According to Emmons' notes, this textwas written in Tlingit by "Shukoff," a half Russian andhalf Tlingit, and given to a Russian interpreter who trans-lated it into English in 1 887 or 1 888.'^

The English version of the sketch is about twentytypewritten pages long and contains a variety ofinteresting data, from myths of the Raven cycle todescriptions of memorial ceremonies (potlatches) andshamanism. By the time this text was written andtranslated only two other detailed ethnographiesof the Tlingit had appeared in print. The first one wasIvan Veniamlnov's pioneering account, based on hissojourn as a Russian Orthodox missionary in Sitka inthe late 1830s and published in Russia in 1840(Veniaminov 1984). The second was Aurel Krause'smonograph based on his trip to southeastern Alaskain 1 881-2 and published in Germany in 1 885 (Krause1956). The latter account relied heavily on the former,particularly when it came to mythology and spiritualculture. Compared to those two works, A Glance atthe First Customs of the Tlingit was less detailed andwas not written as a scholarly work, but as a renditionof an oral presentation. However, it did contain someunique pieces of information that were more likely tohave come from a speaker of Tlingit and a partial in-sider, like "Shukoff," than from outsiders, like Veniaminovand Krause.

in order to better evaluate this text, we must es-tablish the identity of "Shukoff' and that of his transla-tor. The former task is fairly easy, since Emmons tellsus that the man was educated by the Russian Church

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in Sitka and in the early 1 880s was employed by theU.S. Naval Commander and later by the civil authoritiesas a native policeman in Sitka. He died in the mid-1880s at the age of sixty.

The only individual who fit this profile was IvanZhukov, who was born in about 1825 at a Russian-American Company (RAC) post on the Nushagak Riverto a Tlingit mother and a Russian father, a Baranov-erapmmyshlennik ico\on\a\ hunter and trader).'^ As a youngman in 1841, Zhukov served as an apprentice (iunga)on the Company ships. He later studied at the Novo-Arkhangelsk (Sitka) seminary to become a priest forthe Tlingit but was expelled for some "disgustingdeed." However, due to a significant increase in thenumber of Tlingit converts in Sitka, the Church de-cided to appoint him as its interpreter in 1844. Aletter to the local RAC office by the local Orthodoxpriest, Fr. Misail, in which this reassignment of ayoung Tlingit Creole''' was requested, stated thatZhukov could also work as a teacher, instructingTlingit children in the Russian language and teach-ing the Tlingit language to the non-Tlingit seminar-ians. The Company agreed to honor the Consistory'srequest, bringing Zhukov back to Novo-Arkhangelskand appointing him the official tolmach (interpreter)of the Alaska Consistory, with a salary of fifteenrubles a month, plus five rubles a month for teach-ing the "Kolosh" (Tlingit) language.

Zhukov must have been a gifted interpreter andteacher: in 1 845 Bishop Innokentii (Ivan Veniaminov)instructed the Consistory to award him 85 rublesfor his diligent two years of service as a church in-terpreter, and especially for his work on translatingthe Gospel into Tlingit. In 1849-50 he received alarge monetary award for translating several newchapters of the New Testament as well as otherreligious texts into his mother's native tongue. How-ever, a letter from a member of the Consistory tothe RAC Governor, Michail Teben'kov, dated August1 850, pointed out that, while Zhukov had been anexcellent interpreter and did not drink.

His behavior in other respects has becomeso unclean in the last few years, that only adire need forced us [the Consistory] tocontinue employing him. However, lately,despite all of our measures aimed at makinghim improve his conduct, it has become evenworse, thus damaging the cause of Christian-izing the Kolosh. Consequently he must beremoved from the Church's service . . . andsent away from Novo-Arkhangelsk to someother Company post; in the meantime, heshould at least be sent away from the town,so that he would no longer be in contactwith the Kolosh.

One wonders whether Zhukov had been involvedin some sexual misconduct (as he seems to have beenin the post-1867 era) or whether he was obtainingillicit benefits from his special position as a powerfulintermediary between the Church and the local Tlingitcommunity with which he was still connected throughhis maternal kin. In any event, he appeared to havebeen a real survivor. While transferred to Kodiak byTeben'kov in 1850, he must have been needed by theNovo-Arkhangelsk parish and was brought back thereby Voevodskii, since he continued to work for theConsistory until 1852-3 when he was finally fired fromhis job at the Seminary and as the Church's main inter-preter, having been given his final monetary reward forgood work.

In the mid-1860s, Zhukov reappeared in the churchrecords as the RAC interpreter assigned to the Novo-Arkhangelsk port, whom the current missionaries re-lied on for information about the Tlingit population ofSitka and whom they wished to rehire as a churchinterpreter. In 1866, having been frustrated by his ownlack of command of the Tlingit language and havingexamined Tlingit translations available in Novo-Arkhangelsk and found them inadequate, Fr. NikolaiKovrigin, assigned to serve as a missionary to the"Kolosh," decided to ask Zhukov if he had done moreand better translations and to give him Tlingit lessons(ARCA, D 316). Zhukov replied that he had no addi-tional translations in his possession and that he wouldnot mind teaching Kovrigin some Tlingit for a nominalfee. When the priest asked him to take part in his visits

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to Tlingit homes, the interpreter replied that he wastoo busy working in the port but, if offered a salary, hewould be willing to help the priest not only to speakto the Natives but to work on translating Orthodoxprayers.'^ Despite Zhukov's bad reputation among thelocal clergy, Kovrigin, desperate to have a Tlingit-speak-ing assistant, hired him to help compile a census ofSitka's Native population. Before leaving Novo-Arkhangelsk, Fr. Nikolai recommended that the Churchhired a full time Tlingit interpreter, "even a man likeZhukov." However, because of Zhukov's dubious repu-tation, the local bishop vigorously objected to thisproposal.

We know almost nothing about Zhukov's motherand her family, except that she must have been a high-ranking woman, since missionary records mention hersister being married to one of the Sitka lineage heads(ARCA, D 316). Zhukov must have learned to speakfluent Tlingit from his mother and other Tlingit relativesand it is very likely that he maintained close ties withthem, listening to their stories and taking part in theirceremonies or at least observing them, since he seemedto know a great deal about them (see below). Afterall, their houses were just outside the walls of Novo-Arkhangelsk where he lived during the 1840s tothe 1 860s. At the same time, the tone of his ethno-graphic sketch suggests that he identified more withthe Russians.'^

When Alaska was sold by Russia to the UnitedStates in 1867, Zhukov, like many other Creoles, didnot take advantage of an opportunity to return to hisfather's country. But neither did he try to obtain Ameri-can citizenship.''' However, like other "Russians" whoremained in Sitka after its purchase by the U.S., he musthave had a difficult time trying to make ends meet,since his name appeared on an 1 874 list of 1 23 localRussian and Creole inhabitants requesting financial as-sistance from the Russian government to cover thecost of moving to Russia."^ This request was notgranted and Zhukov continued to reside in Sitka. Al-though, like most other local Russians and Creoles, he

remained listed in the parish records, he must not havebeen devout, since the record-keepers referred to himas a "doubtful" (somnitel'nyi) Christian (ARCA, D 405; D414).

A real survivor, Ivan Zhukov continuedto use hislinguistic skills as well as his ability to act as an inter-mediary between his mother's people and the new-comers. Thus we know that the local American offi-cials relied on him to spy on the restless members ofthe Kiks.adi clan during the so-called 1879 "Tlingit un-rest" (ARCA, D 434; The Alaskan 2/6/1886, p. 3; Kan1999:1 98-201, n.d.). Soon thereafter, as I have alreadymentioned, he was hired by the U.S. Naval commander,in charge of maintaining law and order in Alaska, toserve as an interpreter and an Indian policeman.Zhukov served in that capacity until his death (causedby syphilis and a wound which led to gangrene) onFebruary 2, 1886.^«

Before discussing Zhukov's ethnography, a wordmust be said about his sketch's translator, referred toby Emmons only as "George." I believe that he wasnone other than Sitka's most prominent Russian resi-dent, Sergei lonavich Kostromitinov, known to theAmericans as George Kostrometinoff. A son of a RAGemployee and a Creole (Russian-Aleut) woman, he wasborn in Sitka in 1854 and educated at the local Rus-sian colonial and later American schools.'^' Havinggrown up in Sitka, Kostromitinov must have had plentyof opportunities to interact with the local Tlingit. Itwas also rumored that he had a Tlingit mistress (StepanUshin's Diary, ARCA D 434)." From these contacts, hemust have learned to speak fluent Tlingit. Using thatknowledge as well as his fluency in Russian and En-glish," Kostromitinov served for twenty years as anofficial interpreter for court and civil officials in Sitkaand traveled throughout the region in that capacity.'^''As a Deputy U.S. Marshal, he frequently took Nativeand non-Native prisoners south to Seattle and Port-land. A respectable and fairly well-to-do Sitka citizen,he belonged to the town's upper crust and was thedarling of the Russian clergy and American officials

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alike, who called upon him forinformation on Sitka's pre-1867history and Tlingit culture. Sergeilonavich often wrote articles onthese subjects for the Sitkanewspaper and was among thefounders of the Alaska Societyof Natural History and Ethnologyestablished in Sitka in 1887. In1893 he was appointed Lieu-tenant Colonel of the organizedmilitia of the District of Alaskaand he continued to be referredto as the "colonel" for the restof his life. A staunch Russianpatriot, he also served as thewarden (starosta) of Sitka's St.Michael's Russian Orthodox ca-thedral from 1886 until the early1910s, when he decided tobecome an Orthodox priest.Ordained in 1912, he becameone of the Sitka parish's mostpopular pastors, well liked by itsCreole and Tlingit parishionersalike. For his work for the Or-thodox Church, Kostromitinovreceived two awards from theRussian government: a St. Daniel's cross in 1900 (Fig.52) and a silver goblet in 1906 (Ziorov 1 893, passim;The Alaskan 1 /5/1901, p.2; 12/29/1906, p.2; RussianOrthodox American Messenger 1912, vol. 16:305-7).When "Fr. Sergei" died in 191 5, the Church honoredhim by burying his body underneath the cathedral floor.Thus, like Zhukov, Kostromitinov was a bicultural andmultilingual cultural broker who found a new niche forhimself on the new post-1867 Alaska frontier.

While it is impossible to establish how much ofKostromitinov's own knowledge of Tlingit culture isreflected in his translation of Zhukov's ethnographicsketch, I suspect that he did modify the text; in fact,

52/Sergei lonavich Kostromitinov, ca. 1901 in Sitka. Photographer, Elbridge W.Merrill. Alaska State Library, Vinokouroff Collection, PCA 243-1 -27.

there is a parenthetical note by Emmons which saysthat "George" had added some information on a "would-be shaman."

Zhukov's Ethnography

Zhukov's ethnographic sketch is an interesting docu-ment. While its author was a semi-educated amateur,he was trying to offer Emmons a description of "tradi-tional" Tlingit culture of an earlier era while offeringoccasional comments on the changes that had takenplace in it during his lifetime." Thus his brief and rathernaively worded ethnography has a temporal dimen-sion, something lacking in the accounts of indigenous

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cultures produced by Boas himself and most of Boasianethnographers of the JNPE era. For example, Swanton(1908)—whose early works are archetypically Boasian—portrayed the Tlingit culture as a timeless entity. To alesser extent, so did Emmons (1991) in his monumen-tal work, even though the latter does contain a signifi-cant number of references to important historical eventsinvolving the Tlingit.

In contrast to Swanton, Zhukov sprinkled his textwith such statements as, "I am writing about ances-tors of present race. The present race are far from theirancestors, although they are trying to follow in stepsof ancestors but not with same force" (p. 2). His richaccount of the killing of slaves at a ritual for dedicat-ing a new lineage-owned house (pp. 4-8) ends withthe following comment, "Now [they] tear blankets [and?or?] cotton instead of killing slaves" (p. 8).

Zhukov's biculturalism can be felt in the two voiceswith which he speaks about his mother's people. Onthe one hand, one can hear some nostalgia, or at leastregret, in a passage which tells us that the ancestorsof the present-day Tlingit were healthier and physi-cally stronger, since they did not drink.On the otherhand, as a son of a Russian father who identified him-self with the Russians and who spent his entire lifeworking for them and later for the Americans, he gavehis Tlingit contemporaries credit for being "very indus-trious" and earning money by fishing, hunting, cuttingwood, etc. (ibid).

At the same time, some of Zhukov's observationsare written in a non-judgmental, neutral tone, moretypical for ethnographers than missionaries or govern-ment officials. For example, immediately after describ-ing traditional magical practices and formulae, he statesthat the modern-day Natives' use Christian prayer as away of bringing luck in hunting as well as gambling,something of which neither Russian nor American clergywould approve (p. 4).

On the whole, Zhukov's account offers a lot moreinformation on Tlingit religion and mythology (much ofwhich he describes in a section entitled "Superstitions

of [the] Tlingit," thus switching from his more neutral"ethnographic" voice to that of an outsider and long-time interpreter for the Orthodox Church) than on so-cial organization or material culture. This might be areflection of his experience as a missionary interpreterwho had to translate theological concepts from onelanguage into another. Not surprisingly, Veniaminov'sethnography has the same quality (Kan 1990, 1999).Of course, some of the things Zhukov says about Tlingitmythology (especially the episodes of the Raven mythcycle), religious beliefs, and ritual practices can also befound in Veniaminov's and Krause's works as well as inthe subsequent ethnographies by Kamenskii (1905/1 985), Swanton (1908, 1 909) and Emmons (1991).

Zhukov's account, nevertheless, is valuable in someof its minor but unique ethnographic details" as wellas in its use of direct quotations from ceremonialspeeches and magical formulae. Zhukov's ethnographicsketch is also sprinkled with Tlingit terms, some ofwhich would be familiar to most modern-day speak-ers of this language as well as to specialists in Tlingitlinguistics and ethnology, while others appear to bearchaic and would require careful scholarly examina-tion (something I am not ready to do at this point).Thus in his description of the magical observances in-volved in halibut fishing, Zhukov quotes an actual ut-terance made by the fisherman addressing the fish,"Look out, you will tear your mouth [if you struggle].Your bones were in the fire long ago!" (pp. 3-4). Thelast sentence meant that this particular halibut wasa reincarnation of its ancestor whose bones hadbeen burned in a ritually correct manner (cf. Emmons1991:145).

Another example of the richness of Zhukov's ac-count is his description of a special ritual involved inthe potlatch host's greeting of his out-of-town guests,which took place just before they landed in front ofhis village. According to the Creole ethnographer,having been asked by the host where they had comefrom, the guests (standing in their canoes) replied,"We came here by the road ... of the sun." Since

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the sun-wise direction was a ritually positive one, tliisreply meant that, as Zhukov himself explained, "theycame with good faith; they came to have a joyoustime" (p. 7). Prior to the guests' landing, the chief hostordered some slaves to be sacrificed, so as "to kill thetrail" about to be followed by the guests from thebeach to his house (ibid). Although Zhukov does notexplain the meaning of this expression, I have ar-gued that this is another illustration of the centralnotion of the entire cycle of Tlingit memorial feasts,i.e., that the guests, who were members of the moietyopposite to that of the hosts, served as the linkbetween the latter and their departed matrilinealkin (see Kan 1989).^8

My final example is from Zhukov's description of asmoking feast, which was a major component of aseries of rituals following a high-ranking aristocrat'sdeath. According to Zhukov, at the conclusion of smok-ing and an exchange of speeches between the hostsand the guests, the chief host addressed the spirit ofhis deceased predecessor, in whose honor the cer-emony was being given, with the following words,"Stand on one side and let your fathers go by." As theauthor himself explains in parenthesis, this meant thatthe spirit of the deceased was present in the houseuntil his body was cremated (p. 1 7). While other eth-nographers mentioned the existence of such a beliefamong the Tlingit, Zhukov offers us an actual ritualutterance confirming it.

Conclusion

Compared to Emmons' monumental ethnography ofthe Tlingit, Zhukov's sketch is not long at all. Nonethe-less, a careful review of the former demonstrates thatEmmons did learn a lot from this Sitka Creole and in-corporated bits and pieces from Zhukov's account intohis own text. Hence, A Glance at the First Customs ofthe Tlingit or Kolosh as the Russians Found Them at Sitkanot only adds some rather significant details to ourknowledge of the nineteenth century Tlingit culture

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(presented from the point of view of a partial insiderfluent in the local Native language) but helps us betterunderstand the material presented in Emmons' ownoeuvre. How much more this classic work could havetold us about the Tlingit people of the pre-JNPE era ifwe had similar information on Emmons' other Nativesources of data and the specific circumstances of hisfieldwork.'^''

This brief review of Zhukov's ethnography and itsrelationship to that of Emmons, Swanton, Veniaminov,and other fieldworkers who recorded information onTlingit culture is an attempt to suggest ways in whichwe could try to transform the old monographs of theJNPE-era from monolithic and monological texts to morepolyphonic or dialogical ones. The same can be saidabout several other papers appearing in this volume.In its own unique way, each of them demonstrateshow much work still remains to be done on theJNPElegacy, despite a century that separates us from itand the frustrating silence of many of its profes-sional ethnographers about their bilingual/biculturalinterpreters, informants, research assistants, andcollaborators.

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank all of the organizers of the JesupExpedition Centenary Conference, and especially Lau-rel Kendall and Igor Krupnik, for inviting me to presenta paper at this important scholarly gathering and thento transform it into the present piece. Krupnik's sug-gestions and comments on the essay's first draft werevery helpful in my work on its final version. Over theyears, my understanding of George Emmons' contribu-tion to Tlingit ethnography has benefited greatly fromconversations and correspondence with Frederica deLaguna as well as Richard and Nora Dauenhauer. Asalways, a special "thank you" (gunalcheesh) goes to myTlingit friends, adopted relatives, and teachers whoshared with me some valuable inside information onboth Emmons and Kostromitinov.

PARTICIPANTS/ BILINGUAL INFORMANTS

Notes

1. Cf. Anderson and Halpin's discussion (2000)of the recently published field notes of WilliamBynon, a talented ethnographer of mixedTsimshian-Welsh descent.

2. This was true of Boas himself whose com-mand of Kwakwaka'wakw was limited and whorelied heavily on English as well as the Chinookjargon in his research on the Northwest Coast andthe adjacent areas (Berman 1996; Rohner 1969).

3. Thusjudith Berman's (1 996, 2001) rethink-ing of George Hunt's role in Boas' Kwakwaka'wakwresearch, including her detailed linguistic analysisof the Boast/Hunt texts, has given us a very dif-ferent understanding of their nature and quality.

4. I suspect that the reason for the Chilcotinunfriendliness towards the visiting anthropologistwas the mistreatment they had suffered from goldrush packers and prospectors in the 1 860s, whicheventually precipitated a violent confrontation,mislabeled in the annals of British Columbia his-tory as the "Chilcotin War" (Lane 1 981:41 1).

5. More information is currently available onsome of Swanton's Tlingit informants and inter-preters during his later fieldwork of 1 904. Thus,his principal Wrangell informant, Katishan, was awell-known local leader, prominent in his clan (theKaasxagweidi) and the Presbyterian Church (seeSwanton 1909:1; Young 1927). Don Cameron,his main Sitka interpreter and a source of some ofthe ethnographic data, was also an active mem-ber of the Presbyterian Church. Since some of hisdescendants still live in Sitka, his biography couldbe reconstructed (Kan 1979-97). At the sametime, we know nothing about Dekinaak'w, "an oldman of the Box House," the source of many of thetexts recorded by Swanton in Sitka in English andTlingit (ibid.).

6. For an interesting and thoughtful discus-sion of Native American ethnographers and an-thropologists' informants outside the JNPE contextsee, for example, several essays in Casagrande(1960), Liberty (1978), and especially the morerecent and more theoretically-sophisticated worksby Buckley (1989) and Brown (1989).

7. Like Bogoras, Jochelson did mention someof his Native assistants in the introduction to hisworks. Thus we know that his two main Yukagir

interpreters and informants were Aleksei Dolga-nov and Ivan Spiridonov, while a RussianizedKoryak, Nikolai Vilkhin ("the only tolerably goodinterpreter in the Cishiga district") assisted him inrecording and translating Koryak myths (jochelson1908:1 5).

8 Emmons' most important publications onTlingit culture include a monograph on basketry(1 903), the Chilkat blanket (1 907), and the WhaleHouse of the Chilkat (1916). The only other Na-tive American culture that he studied was that ofthe Athapaskan-speaking Tahltan of the British Co-lumbia interior (1 911).

9. Clear evidence of Emmons' being ac-cepted by the Tlingit is the fact that he was in-vited to various feasts and potlatches (e.g.,Emmons 1991:391). In addition several of myTlingit consultants and friends told me that foryears Emmons was involved in an intimate rela-tionship with a Tlingit woman (Kan 1 979-1 997).

10. A related manuscript by Emmons, en-titled History of Tlingit Tribes and Clans, still remainsunpublished, although material from it has beenincorporated by de Laguna into Emmons' (1991)monograph and used by Hope (2000) in his on-going research on traditional Tlingit tribes, clans,and clan houses.

1 1. This document has been deposited in theAnthropology Archive of the American Museumof Natural History (AMNH-DA), together withEmmons' The Tlingit Indians.

12. While the title page of this sketch lists1882 as the date of its translation into English, aparenthetical remark within the text itself indicatesthat in 1 887 the interpreter himself added someinformation to Shukoff s (Zhukov's) account of sha-manism. Hence I cannot agree with de Laguna's(1 991 :xi) dating of this translation as 1 884.

13. Biographical information on Zhukovcould be found in the Alaska Russian Church Ar-chives (ARCA, D 347; D 434). Some of the mate-rial presented in this paper appeared in my earliermonograph on the history of Russian OrthodoxChristianity among the Tlingit (Kan 1999:131-3,167-8).

14. "Creole" was a standard term used bythe Russian-American Company to refer to theoffspring of a mixed Russian-Native Alaskanunion.

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1 5. From Zhukov's other comments, it ap-pears that he was trying to get a higher price forhis services, portraying the study of Tlingit lan-guage as a very difficult task.

1 6. Thus Zhukov never referred to the Tlingitas "my people," calling them "the natives" instead.

1 7. Church records dating back to the early1 870s list him as a "Creole" rather than an "Ameri-can citizen," a category which included the morerespectable segment of the local "Russian" com-munity whose members did not or claimed not tohave any Native Alaskan blood.

18. Fr. Nikolai Mitropol'skii's file (ARCA, B

20).

1 9. Thus, in 1 880 Zhukov traveled on boardof the U.S.S. Jamestown to various coastal villagesin order to interpret for the Navy officers in theirdeliberations with the Tlingit (Stepan Ushin's Di-ary, ARCA, D 434).

20. Zhukov's Tlingit fellow-policemen car-ried his coffin to the cemetery and were followedby uniformed sailors and soldiers. As his bodywas lowered into the ground, guns were fired(Stepan Ushin's Diary, ARCA D 434).

21. For biographical data on Sergei I.Kostrornitinov, see ARCA (B 14), Kostrometinoff(1 876-1 908), Pierce (1 990:262-3), and Kan (1 999,passim).

22. According to Tlingit sources (Kan 1979-97), a number of his descendants still reside inseveral Tlingit communities.

23. Kostromitinov might have also had thecommand of Aleut.

24. The Russian Church also took advantageof Kostromitinov's knowledge of Tlingit, assign-ing him the task of translating Veniaminov's fa-mous sermon. Guide to the Heavenly Kingdom, intothat language. The translation was published inSitka in 1 901.

25. It is actually not entirely clear whetherZhukov wrote his sketch specifically for Emmons.

26. Zhukov's sketch begins with am inter-esting page-long description of the physical char-acteristics and bodily adornment of the "old-time"Tlingit men and women (Pp.1-2).

27. Thus, for example, his description of thepractices involved in the preservation and ceremo-nial use of enemies' scalps (2) is more detailedthan Emmons' (1 991:335).

28. Cf. an expression "killing the money," usedto refer to the potlatch hosts' distribution ofmoney among the guests (Kan 1979-97).

29. To Emmons' credit, he did occasionallymention the name of a Tlingit person who hadgiven him a particular piece of information; he alsooften indicated whether he had personally at-tended a native ceremony he was describing (seeEmmons 1 991).

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De Laguna, Frederica

1991 Editor's Introduction: George ThorntonEmmons as Ethnographer. In George T. Emmons. TheTlingit Indians. Frederica de Laguna, ed. Pp. xvii-xxv.Seattle: University of Washington Press.

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1 907 The Chilkat Blanket. Ibid, vol.3, pt. 4:329-401.

1911 The Tahltan Indians. University Museum Anthro-pological Publications A{\):S-\ 20.

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Williamson

1 988 Capitalist Philanthropy and Russian Revolution-aries: the Jesup North Pacific Expedition. AmericanAnthropologist 90( 1): 7-24.

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2000 Appendix. In Will the Time Ever Come? A TlingitSource Book. Andrew Hope, III and Thomas F.Thornton, eds. Pp. 127-59. Fairbanks: University ofAlaska Press.

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1 908 The Koryak. The Jesup North Pacific Expedi-tion, vol.6, pts. 1 -2. Memoirs of the American Museumof Natural History, 10. Leiden: E.J. Brill.

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1985 [1906] Tlingit Indians of Alaska. Translatedby Sergei Kan. Fairbanks: University of Alaska Press.Kan, Sergei

1 979-97 Unpublished Notes on Tlingit History

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1 992 Boas' Research Agenda and the Russian Par-ticipants in the Jesup Expedition. Unpublished paperpresented at the First International Congress of Arc-tic Social Sciences, Ste-Foy, Quebec.

1999 Memory Eternal: Tlingit Culture and Russian Or-thodox Christianity Through Two Centuries. Seattle:University of Washington Press.

2000 The Mystery of the Missing Monograph or WhyShternberg's "The Social Organization of the Cilyak"Never Appeared among the Jesup Expedition Publi-cations. European Review of Native American Studies14(2): 19-38.

2001a The "Russian Bastian and Boas": Why Shtern-berg's "The Social Organization of the Cilyak" NeverAppeared among the Jesup Expedition Publications.In Gateways: Exploring the Legacy of the Jesup NorthPacific Expedition, 1897-1902. Igor Krupnik and Wil-liam W. Fitzhugh, eds. Pp.217-56. Contributions toCircumpolar Anthropology, 1. Washington, DC: Arc-tic Studies Center.

2001b Strangers to Relatives: The Adoption and Nam-ing of Anthropologists in Native North America. SergeiKan, ed. Lincoln, Nebraska: University of NebraskaPress.

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Kostrometinoff, George [Kostromitinov,Sergei I.]

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1 97

53/ A group of the "forest" Yukagir on the Yassachnaya River, fall 1901. Photographer, Waldemar Jochelson(AMNH I 1013)

PEOPLE, ANIMALS, AND LAND: AJESUP THEME REVISITED

1"he Jesup Expedition and the jViodemizationof f\jort!i pacific f\jaturai ["jistory

ROBERT S. HOFFMANN

At the turn of the last century, the Jesup North PacificExpedition of the American IVIuseum of Natural History(1897-1902) established a new paradigm for the "fieldsciences"—those scientific endeavors that explore thenatural world and the role of humans and their cultureswithin that world. Disciplines such as geology, geog-raphy, botany, zoology, and anthropology were at thattime, and to a significant extent remain, based prima-rily on data collected directly from the natural world("the field"), through observation, measurement, andcollection of specimens. While in the Western scientifictradition such fieldwork had been carried on for atleast four centuries, it was given strong impetus bythe worldwide growth of European colonial empires inthe eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, which allowedWestern scientists freer access to the more remoteand less studied parts of the globe. This access wasprimarily used to accumulate specimens in the narrowfield of the individual scientist's area of interest (forexample, mammals), which were placed in museumsin Western, or in some cases, colonial capitals.

The significant difference in the Jesup North PacificExpedition and the later (1916-1930) Asiatic expedi-tion of the American Museum of Natural History lay indeliberate combining of scientists from different disci-plines into a single field team ("the method of corre-lated work"; see Andrews 1932). Similarly, the JesupExpedition Centennial—with its arrays of papers, sym-posia, and historiographic research—brought to-gether anthropologists, linguists, geneticists, and

evolutionary and environmental biologists (note thechanging disciplinary nomenclature) to examinechanges that have occurred in our knowledge andunderstanding of both human cultures and biotas ofthe North Pacific, including Beringia.

The Jesup Expedition as a "Natural History"Venture

This "correlated work", which made the Jesup Ex-pedition such a breakthrough, is effective only if theseveral specialists staffing a complex expedition arewilling to spend at least some of their time workingoutside of their own specialties. That this was true ofthe JNPE pattern of fieldwork can be seen by the re-sults of its mammal collecting (Allen 1903). Altogether,about 500 specimens of twenty-nine species wereobtained from seven different localities throughouteastern Siberia. These were, from south to north;

(1) Vladivostok (43°09' N, 1 3r53' E);

(2) "lower Amoor" (Amur River, near Nikolaevsk-na-Amure, at 53" 10' N, 140°44' E);

(3) "Gichiga, on the west coast of the Sea ofOkhotsk" (the town of Cizhiga, actually, at theextreme northeast corner of that sea, at the headof Shelikov Gulf and mouth of the Cizhiga River,62°00' N, 160 34' E);

(4) "Marcova, on the middle Anadyr River, 600miles north of Cichiga" (the town of Markovo,actually, about 330 miles northeast of Cizhiga);

20 1

(5) "near the mouth of the Anadyr River" (near orat the site of the present-day city of Anadyr,64°50' N, 1 76W E);

6) "Indian Point, on the extreme northeasterncoast of Siberia" (Cape Chaplin, actually, thesoutheastern tip of the Chukchi Peninsula, at6474' N, 172°10' E); and

(7) "Verkhne Kolimsk, on the middle KolymaRiver" (the town of Verkhne-Kolymsk on theupper Kolyma River, at 65 38', N 1 50 40' E).

Most specimens were, to be sure, collected and pre-pared by Norman Buxton, thejesup Expedition's des-ignated zoologist (Figs.54-56); but a significant num-ber were captured by several of the expedition's an-thropologists—Bogoras, Jochelson, and Laufer (Allen1903:101-2).

The collection, now at the American Museum, in-cludes what were then considered to be twelve newspecies, two of them named by their describer, J. A.Allen, in honor of Norman Buxton. In addition, Buxtonobtained 800 birds representing 125 species, publishedsubsequently by Allen (1905), including a new speciesof lark, Alauda buxtoni; he was also commissioned tocollect other vertebrates.

Norman Ceer Buxton (1872-??), the only trainedbiologist on the JNPE staff, remains a shadowy figurein the expedition. His only written material appears tobe section of J. A. Allen's report titled "Itinerary andGeneral Description of the Country" (Buxton 1903; seealso Figs. 57-61). He was from Johnstown, Ohio, andhad served earlier as a collector for Edward AveryMcllhenny's expedition to Point Barrow, Alaska, for thePhiladelphia Academy of Natural Sciences in 1897-8(Allen 1903; Stone W. 1900).' The only other source ofinformation about that expedition may be found in apopular article written by Mcllhenny (1904). Althoughit does not mention Buxton, it gives some hint of whathe experienced in Alaska on that trip.

None of the new species from Siberia named byAllen has retained its identity up to the present, allnow being considered synonyms of earlier names. This

202

was due to the way in which post-Jesup systematistsaltered their views of evolution and speciation in theensuing century, discussion of which makes up theremainder of this essay.

Franz Boas, the lead scientist for thejesup Expedi-tion, was a pivotal figure in this changing course ofWestern science. Formally educated in mathematicsand physics as well as geography, Boas was fasci-nated by what he saw as a fundamental dichotomybetween "physics" and "cosmography." Today we usedifferent words—inductive science versus deductive,observational or field sciences (see above) that can begrouped under the rubric of natural history (Boas 1887).It was his lifelong goal to produce a synthesis of thesetwo modes of science, which probably led him to staffthe Jesup Expedition with a variety of specialists.

The "natural history" aspect of the Jesup Expedi-tion was thus quite broad. However, in contrast to theanthropological team whose fieldwork was undertakenby seasoned ethnographers (like Bogoras, Jochelson,and Boas himself) or professionally trained young gradu-ates (like Laufer), the fieldwork of the biology teamwas undertaken by hired collectors, such as Buxton inSiberia, and A.J. Stone for the collecting in Alaska andnorthwestern Canada supported by the American Mu-seum at about the same time. Whereas the anthro-pologists published their own scientific reports, thenatural history reports of the JNPE were written by otherpeople, such as J. A. Allen, Curator of Birds and Mam-mals at the American Museum, who was no longerphysically capable of field work under the strenuousconditions encountered in Siberia or Alaska (Allen 1903,1905). It was, however, common in the natural historytradition for museum curators to remain with their col-lections, while they employed collectors to obtain thematerial necessary for their research. Perhaps the bestknown such team was the British Museum's OldfieldThomas and his collectors, among them MalcolmAnderson and Douglas Carruthers.

Andrew J. Stone was from Missoula, Montana, butno more is known of him than is of Buxton. He was

PEOPLE, ANIMALS, AND LAND/ NATURAL HISTORY

engaged by Allen to collect in Alaska, Yukon, and North-west Territories from 1896 to 1903, funded mainly byJ. M. Constable, Trustee and First Vice President of theAmerican Museum. Logically, this might have beenconsidered the New World portion of the JesupExpedition, since the area surveyed was the counter-part of northeastern Siberia east of the Bering Strait.However, it was not so designated, nor was it calledthe "Constable Expedition" after its funder, but wasnamed after the hired collector. Stone published onlyone paper from his trip (Stone 1900), covering his itin-erary and geographical notes, observations of the largermammals, and a few comments on Native inhabitantsfor 1896-8 —the same type of material that Buxtonwrote for Allen— while the scientific results were pub-lished by Allen in a series of twelve papers between1897 and 1905. Why Allen (and Boas) should havedownplayed the museum's fieldwork in eastern Beringia,while publicizing it on the other side of the Bering Strait,is unclear. It may be related to the fact that the U. S.National Museum in Washington already had aheadstart in this area through the activities of W. H.Dall, R. Kennicott, E. W. Nelson, W. H. Osgood, E. A.Preble, and others.

Collections and the Changing View of theSpecies

At the close of the nineteenth century, the term "bio-logical diversity" had not been coined, and ecologywas in its infancy. Species of organisms, and for thatmatter, human populations ("races"), were defined ty-pologically, on the basis of their morphology, and whileDarwinian evolution was generally accepted by thescientific community, an understanding of the basis—the genetics of individuals and populations—was justdeveloping. It is interesting to compare the number ofspecies recognized by systematists of the Jesup Expe-dition era with those later in the century. I will restrictmyself to Beringian mammals, since that is my spe-cialty, but similar trends are evident in most othergroups, and in the wider North Pacific region.

Table 2/ Total Number of Recognized Land Mammal Speciesin Behngia at the End of the Nineteenth Century

West Beringia only

Holarctic

East Beringia only

(Northeast Siberia)

(Alaska and Yukon)

10 shrews

10 shrews

2 lagomorphs

3 lagomorphs

1 marmot

1 marmot

1 ground

4 ground

squirrel

squirrels

1 red-backed

1 red-

3 red-backed

vole

backed vole

voles

3 lemmings

4 lemmings

4 gray voles

12 gray voles

14 carnivores

2

carnivores

24 carnivores

5 ungulates

4 ungulates

subtotal: 41

3

65

TOTAL 44

68

Around 1 900, a total of 1 09 species of terrestrialmammals had been named as inhabiting Beringia, forty-four in eastern Siberia, and sixty-eight in the Alaskan-Yukon region (Table 2). But of these, only three wereconsidered Holarctic species; that is, found both inEurasia and North America. These were the northernredbacked vole, Evotomys(=Clethrionomys) rutilus, arcticfox, \/ulpes{=Alopex) lagopus, and polar bear Thalarctos(=Ursus) maritimus. A fourth species, musk-ox Ovibosmoschatus, had a historically Holarctic distribution, butwas extinct in both western and eastern Beringia atthat time; subsequently it was successfully reestab-lished on both sides of the Bering Strait. That morethan 100 species of mammals were to be found in thenorthern North Pacific at the time of the Jesup Expedi-tion suggests a degree of species richness that wenow believe was almost a two-fold overestimate. How-ever, the application of systematics and taxonomy inthe study of biodiversity does not always lead to ex-aggeration of species richness. I will illustrate its upsand downs in the twentieth century by focusing on afew major groups of Beringian mammals with which Iam most familiar.

In 1900, there were thought to be ten species ofred-toothed shrews (genus Sorex) in east Beringia,and nine in west, none shared, for a total of nineteenspecies. Of the ground squirrels and marmots, there

R. S. HOFFMANN

203

were two in west Beringia and five in east Beringia,again, none shared. Of the gray voles (genus Mi-crotus), there were four in the west and twelve inthe east, none of which were Holarctic (Table 3).

A pattern of more described species in eastBeringia (Alaska-Yukon) is evident, both in total mam-mals, and in the selected groups, caused for themost part by the tendency of North American mam-malogists to "over-split" taxonomic units. In its ex-treme form, this was exemplified by the taxonomyof the North American brown bears, or grizzlies,published by Merriam (1918) in which he recog-nized seventy-six species of bears, allocatedamong fifteen groups, in North America alone. Thisfor a species now regarded as a single entity, withfewer than ten subspecies at most.

Genetics and the Biological SpeciesConcept

Table 3/ Numbers of Shrews, Marmots, Ground Squirrels, aridCray Voles Recognized in Beringia, End of Nineteenth Century

West Beringia only

Shrews (Sorex)

Sorex macropygmaeusaraneusultimussibiriensissanguinidens

tomensis

vir

gracillimustscherskii

subtotal: 9

Holarctic East Beringia only

Sorex personatus

pribilofensis

arcticus

tundrensis

richardsoni

sphagnicola

glacial is

hoyi

hydrodromuspalustris10

Marmots (Marmota) and Ground Squirrels (Spermophilus)

Arctomys kamtschaticaCitellus undulatus

subtotal: 2

Cray Voles (Microtus)

Arvicola slowzoviibuturlinitshuktshorum

Aschizomys lemminus

Shortly thereafter, a reaction against such taxonsplitting began to set in, culminating in the workofjulian Huxley (1940, 1 942) and Ernst Mayr(l 942)of the American Museum and supported by thework of the expatriate Russian geneticist and naturalhistorian, T. Dobzhansky of Columbia University(1941). They introduced the important new ideas of"polytypic species" and the "biological species con-cept." Mayr (1942:146) commented that "new investi-gation . . . show[s] that many of the previously recog-nized species are nothing but subspecies of widespreadpolytypic species. The acceptance of the modern bio-logical concept... resulted in an extraordinary simpli-fication of the system."

The shift from a monotypic, typological speciesconcept to a polytypic, biological one was important,but the emergence of statistical applications and nu-merical systematics also contributed to "simplification,"(i.e., the "lumping" of two or more taxa previouslyconsidered distinct species into a single, presumablypolytypic one. This paradigmatic shift also had an im-pact on anthropologist's views of what constituted

subtotal:TOTAL:

413

00

Arctomys pruinosusSpermophilus empetra

beringianus

osgoqdi

barrowensis

5

Microtus miurus

abbreviatusoperariusunalascensismacfarlanisitkensiskodiacensisinnuitusdrummondiixanthognathuspennsylvanicus1227

human species and subspecies ("races"), particularlyby emphasizing the importance of gene flow betweenpopulations. The shift resulted in an apparent declinein mammal species richness in Beringia; in the 1950sand early 1960s, the number in west Beringia was thirty-two, and in east Beringia, also thirty-two, equal on bothsides of the Bering Strait. But of these, twenty-five hadHolarctic distributions, so the total number of speciesrecognized fell to thirty-nine (Table 4), slightly morethan a third of the number recognized in 1900. Of thenineteen species of Sorex that had been named bythe early 1900s (see Table 3), only six were recog-nized at mid-century, two of which were Holarctic.One marmot (instead of two) was recognized, but itwas Holarctic, as was a single Holarctic ground squir-rel. Five species of gray voles, instead of sixteen,were recognized, three of which were Holarctic (Table5).

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PEOPLE, ANIMALS, AND LAND/ NATURAL HISTORY

Cladistics and the Evolutionary Spe-cies Concept

The next, and current, phase of systematic analy-sis began in the mid-1960s with the widespreadadoption of the concepts and principles of cla-distic analysis of systematic relationships, or phy-logenetic systematics, which have, in this period,produced a revolution in evolutionary studies, in-cluding the evolutionary species concept. The con-cept was pioneered by G. G. Simpson, who heldjoint tenure at both the American Museum and Co-lumbia University. It is a "lineage" or "clade" conceptof the species, "a single lineage of ancestor-descen-dant populations which maintains its identity fromother such lineages, and which has its own evolution-ary tendencies and historical fate" (modified fromSimpson 1961; quoted in Wiley 1981:25).

Additionally, development of several new tech-niques—comparative studies of chromosomes, proteinelectrophoresis, and multivariate statistics—were fol-lowed by DNA studies (restriction site analysis, basepair sequencing, etc.) and sophisticated modeling ofphylogenetic topology and significance testing. Thecombination of new data generated by differenttechniques, and their analysis through the principlesof phylogenetic systematics, has resulted in an increaseonce more in the number of species recognized, asthose previously thought to be polytypic species havebeen shown to consist of two or more distinct spe-cies. Species richness in Beringia now stands at fortyspecies in west (Siberia), and forty-two in east Beringia(Alaska and Yukon), of which eighteen are Holarctic indistribution, for a total of sixty-four species in Beringiaas a whole (Table 6), more than one and one-half timesthe number admitted during the period of indiscriminantlumping under the polytypic species rubric.

The Future:

Gene Sequencing and Phyiogeography

The new techniques mentioned above have led to morerobust hypotheses of phylogenetic relationships based

Table 4/ Total Number of Recognized Land Mammal Species in Beringia,Mid-twentieth Century

West Beringia only(Northeast Siberia)

Holarctic

East Beringia only(Alaska and Yukon)

3 shrews

2 shrews

1 shrew

1 lagomorph

1 lagomorph

, 2 lagomorphs

1 marmot

1 ground squirrel

1 red-backed vole

1 red-backed vole

1 lemming

2 lemmings

1 lemming

1 gray vole

3 gray vole

1 gray vole

10 carnivores

2 carnivores

4 ungulates

Subtotal: 7

25

7

Total:

32

32

on cladistic analysis of larger and more diverse sets ofcharacters. Examples of such hypotheses can be illus-trated by the shrews, marmotines, and voles I havebeen emphasizing. George (1988) based her analysison electrophoretic data from twenty-six species ofthe genus Sorex, including ten from the North Pacificregion. She found that they clustered into three majorclades; a primitive North American one; then a Eurasiangroup that included, in addition, two North Americanspecies (S. arcticus, S. tundrensis); and, finally, a largergroup of North American Sorex belonging to thesubgenus Otisorex. Only one small clade, consistingof S. araneus (Eurasia), S. arcticus (North American),and S. rw/i(;/rens/5 (Beringian) displayed an Holarcticdistribution. Recently, Dokuchaev (1997) described anew allospecies, Sorex yukonensis, which with S.m;>7uf/ss/ww5 forms an Holarctic superspecies.

With respect to the ground squirrels and marmots(tribe Marmotini), ongoing work in molecular phylog-eny of the Spermophilini by an international researchgroup- clearly demonstrates several novel points:

(1) ground squirrels are paraphyletic, with at leastfive distinct clades (Harrison et al., n.d.);

(2) marmots, instead of being ancestral to groundsquirrels, fall within the ground squirrel clades;

(3) both ground squirrels and marmots havedistinct North American and Eurasian speciesgroups, with only one species, the arctic groundsquirrel, having an Holarctic distribution. These

R. S. HOFFMANN

205

preliminary conclusionsare based on completesequencing of themitochondrial cyto-chrome bgene, andsampling of all specieslevel taxa in the twogroups, a total of sixty-three, plus five outgrouptaxa (Harrison et al., n.d.).

Table 5/ Number of Shrews, Marmot'mes, and Cray Voles Recognized in Beringia,Mid-twentieth Century

West Beringia only Holarctic

East Beringia only

Sorex minutus Sorex caecutiens Sorex vagrans

hawker! araneus

Marmota marmotaSpermophilus undulatusEothenomys lemminus Microtus agrestis Microtus xanthognathus

gregaliseconomus

Total: 3 7 2

Cray voles of the genusMicrotus (sensu lato) are widely agreed to be amongthe most difficult mammals systematically. A new hy-pothesis based on fairly complete chromosomal stud-ies at the species level, less complete electrophore-sis, and DNA comparisons of a few species, havebeen synthesized into a new taxonomic schemewith relevance for the North Pacific and Beringia. Whatwas previously regarded as a single genus, Microtus, avery large and heterogeneous taxon, has now beensubdivided into twenty genera or subgenera, of whichseveral have Holarctic distributions (Zagorodnyuk1990; Musser and Carleton 1992). In this scheme, thereare four major clades of gray voles, one restricted tothe Palearctic, two to the Nearctic, and one in the Hol-arctic, which contains Beringian species and speciesgroups. This pattern is similar to what we have alreadyseen in the Beringian shrews and marmotines, and sug-gests the possibility of chronological and evolutionaryconcordance across the Bering land bridge in the Pleis-tocene.

The groups I have focused on are small to medium-size mammals, and the general patterns I have describedtend to hold for these size classes. However, Beringianungulates and carnivores are mostly large to verylarge in size, and a greater proportion of them showHolarctic distributions. Note, however, that the small-est carnivores—the ermine and weasel—are also Hol-arctic. This correlation of distributional pattern withbody size and ecological niche probably results fromthe fact that such mammals have larger home rangesand greater dispersal ability compared to small mam-

mals, and are thus more likely to have establishedamphiberingian ranges at sometime during the Pleis-tocene (Hoffmann 1984).

The most recent trend is what has been termed"phylogeography" (Avise 1998), the "historical aspectsof the contemporary spatial distributions of gene lin-eages." Most phylogeographic studies have beenbased on sequence data from maternally inherited mi-tochondrial genes, but other gene markers are rapidlybeing developed. At a recent international mammalcongress held in Spain in July 1998, over forty papersemploying the phylogeographic approach were given(Reig 1998), a considerable number of them being de-voted to mammals of the Beringian region, both largeand small. Thus, this newest application will lead toexplicit hypotheses of animal migrations, and has beenapplied to human migrations across Beringia as well(Schurr and Wallace, this volume).

And the Sea Between

Beringian marine mammals, all large to very large,require comment at this point. Thirty-one speciescurrently occur in the cold-temperate to arctic watersof the North Pacific and Arctic Oceans, linked by theBering Sea. Of these, one is the coastal sea otter (Enhydrislutris); seven are coastal to pelagic seals and sea lions(including northern fur seal); and twenty-three arewhales, including eight baleen and fifteen toothedwhales. In sharp contrast to the nomenclatural insta-bility described above for Beringian terrestrial mam-mals, the marine mammal species limits and recog-

206

PEOPLE, ANIMALS, AND LAND/ NATURAL HISTORY

Table 6/ Total Number of Recognized Land Mammal Species in Behngia,End of Twentieth Century

West Beringia only

Holarctic

East Beringia only

9 shrews

2 shrews

6 shrews

1 lagomorph

1 lagomorph

2 lagomorphs

1 marmot

1 ground squirrel

2 marmots

1 red-backed vole

1 red-backed vole

4 lemmings

1 lemming

5 lemmings

3 gray voles

1 gray vole

4 gray voles

2 carnivores

8 carnivores

4 carnivores

1 ungulate

3 ungulates

1 ungulate

subtotal: 22

18

24

Total:

40

42

nized names have changed very little in the past cen-tury. Only one new species of whale has been describedfrom this region in the last 100 years; Mesoplodoncarlhubbsi'm 1963, from the southern edge of the areain question. Similarly, only one additional seal, Phocalargha, was recognized in 1977 as a distinct species,having formerly been considered a subspecies of thecommon harbor seal, Phoca vitullina.

All of these marine mammals have Holarctic ranges,not surprising given the virtually continuous coastaland pelagic habitats spanning the rim of the NorthPacific. Only one now extinct Beringian species wasnot known to be Holarctic—the Steller seacow,Hydrodamalis gigas—whose only known range encom-passed the Commander Islands off the eastern coastof the Kamchatka Peninsula. Discovered in 1741 andexterminated in 1 768, it was strictly coastal in habitat.Its closest living relative is the dugong of the Indianand Western Pacific Oceans, but more closely relatedfossil forms are known from the North Pacific. The ex-tinction of this unique species through indiscriminantharvest for meat by hunters was a severe loss to thebiological diversity of the Beringian region, since it rep-resented the end of a specialized, highly adapted lin-eage.

Conserving North Pacific Biological Diversity

Other Beringian species nearly suffered the same fate.Sea otter populations shrank back from the southernends of their large original range, and no longer occur

in northern Japan, southern California, andnorthern Mexico. Elsewhere, the popu-lation was severely reduced and frag-mented, surviving only in small areas ofcentral California, the outer Aleutian Islands,and the Kurile Islands. Under protection,the species has now recovered some ofits range, with help from reintroduction,and is now fairly regular in Kamchatka, theCommander Islands, central and southernAlaska, and parts of British Columbia.Many of the baleen whales suffered a similar fate,and their numbers are still depressed, especially theEurasian population of gray whale, and all populationsof blue, right, and bowhead whales. There has alsobeen a recent serious decline in the Steller sea lionpopulation of unknown origin; it is speculated thatheavy fishing pressure in the North Pacific and BeringSea may be at least part of the cause, by reducing thesea lion's food base.

Terrestrial mammals have fared better. Populationsof many of the large mammals have been reduced,and local extinctions are widespread, but overall,species populations are not endangered. Small andmedium-size mammals are still widespread and oftencommon, but no accurate assessments of populationstatus exist for most places.

Due to some degree of protection (hunting regula-tions, preserves, captive breeding, reintroductions, etc.),the status of some species has improved. In additionto the sea otter, the musk-ox has benefited fromprotection and reintroduction, and is now reestablishedboth in Alaska and eastern Siberia. The sable, seriouslyover-harvested in the past, has also increased in bothnumbers and distribution.

In most, if not all, cases, reduction of biodiversity inBeringia and the North Pacific, both historically andup to the present, has been caused by direct humanexploitation. The future challenge is not only to gainsufficient knowledge of these ecosystems so thathuman use of biotic resources can be placed on a

R. S. HOFFMANN

207

sustainable basis; but also, it is to conserve enough ofthe natural world to ensure that these ecosystems,both terrestrial and marine, will remain viable. Fourmajor formations encompass terrestrial ecosystemsof the lands bordered by the North Pacific betweenabout 35° and 75° North latitude. These are arcticand mountain tundra, taiga (boreal forest), and mixedconiferous/broad-leafed forest, with patches of steppeinland along the southern margins.

The most threatened of these formations is themixed forest. In the United States and Canada, thisformation, sometimes called a "temperate rainforest,"is the focus of an ongoing controversy over whatlevel of logging is sustainable in these forests, andwhat proportion of the old-growth "ancient forests"should be protected. On the Eurasian side, a parallelcontroversy focuses on the mixed forest of the Rus-sian Far East, particularly in the drainages of the Amurand Ussuri River basins, which also includes a signifi-cant part of northeastern China (former Manchuria),and the appended Korean Peninsula. Another countryin this region is Japan, in particular, its two northernislands, Hokkaido and Honshu. Along the southernmargins of the region, on both sides of the Pacific,much of this unique forest is already cut over. How-ever, the opportunity to manage the mixed forests ofAlaska, western Canada, and the Russian Far East stillexists, and with it the opportunity to preserve theirrich biodiversity, with many unique species. A smallsampling includes Siberian tiger, Amur leopard. LakeEvoron vole, three or four species of tree voles, moun-tain beaver, shrew-moles, Chinese soft-shelled turtle,giant salamander, Steller's sea eagle, and northernspotted owl.

With a few conspicuous exceptions, these specieshave little or no commercial value. On the other hand,trees, when reduced to logs, have an immediate com-mercial value to the people who cut them down, eventhough the forest ecosystem from which the treescame had an even greater global economic value interms of photosynthesis (carbon dioxide absorption from,

oxygen release to, the atmosphere), watershed protec-tion (runoff, erosion control), soil building, and otherecosystem services.

Past history demonstrates that when individuals orcorporations have the opportunity for short-term profitby exploiting natural resources (be they sea otters orredwoods), they will usually act to do so. This is espe-cially true if the exploiter does not reside in the eco-system or community that is exploited.

The two keys to sustained utilization of naturalresources from ecosystems are: (1) sufficient knowl-edge of composition and function of the ecosystemto make informed decisions concerning exploitation;and (2) policies controlling exploitation determined bypeople residing within the ecosystem, who have avital stake in prudent policy-making (of course, goodpolicy is only as good as its implementation andenforcement). Here is a vital problem, the solutionto which both natural historians and anthropolo-gists could contribute more effectively if theyworked together rather than separately. It is timeto revive "the method of correlated work" to con-duct research on a wide variety of topics by inter-national teams of scientists in the spirit of the Boasiansynthesis.

That the broad view of field research espoused byBoas remains alive is seen in the scope of "planetarybiology", a newly coined name for the combined disci-plines of biology (both molecular and whole organism)with palaeontology and geology. One can only won-der what those industrious but almost unknown fieldcollectors, Buxton and Stone, would make of that.

Notes

1. We are grateful to Mr. Donald Cunninghamfor the information on Buxton's year of birth aswell as his first and second name.

2. N. N. Vorontsov, E. A. Lyapunova, Instituteof Developmental Biology, Moscow; R.C. Harrison,P. W. Sherman, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York,E. Yensen, Albertson College, Idaho and R. S.Hoffmann, Smithsonian Institution.

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PEOPLE, ANIMALS, AND LAND/ NATURAL HISTORY

ReferencesAllen, Joel A.

1 903 Report on the Mammals Collected in North-eastern Siberia by the Jesup North Pacific Expedition,with Itinerary and Field Notes, by N. C.Buxton. Bulle-tin of the American Museum of Natural History 19:101-84.

1905 Report on the Birds Collected in NortheasternSiberia by the Jesup North Pacific Expedition, withField Notes by the Collector. /Wrf 21:219-57.Andrews, Roy C.

1 932 The New Conquest of Central Asia. NaturalHistory of Central Asia, vol. 1. New York: AMNH.

Avise, John C.1998 The History and Purview of Phylogeography;a Personal Reflection. Molecular Ecology 7:37]-79.

Boas, Franz

1887 The Study of Geography. In Volksgeist asMethod and Ethics: Essays on Boasian Ethnography andthe German Anthropological Tradition. George W. Stock-ing, Jr., ed. Pp. 9-16. History of Anthropology, 8. Madi-son: University of Wisconsin Press.

Buxton, Norman G.

1 903 Itinerary and General Description of the Coun-try. In Report on the Mammals Collected in Northeast-ern Siberia by the Jesup North Pacific Expedition. ByA.J. Allen. Bulletin of the American Museum of NaturalHistory 19:104-19.

Dobzhansky, Theodore

1941 Genetics and the Origin of Species. 2nded.NewYork: Columbia University Press.Dokuchaev, Nikolai E.1997 A New Species of Shrew (Soricidae, Insectivora)from Alaska. Journal of Mammalogy 78:81 1-17.George, Sarah B.1988 Systematics, Historical Biogeography, andEvolution of the Genus Sorex. Journal of Mammalogy69:443-61.

Harrison, R. G., Steven M. Bogdanowicz, RobertS. Hoffmann, Eric Yenson, and Paul W. Sherman

n.d. Evolutionary Relationships in the Ground Squir-rels (Rodentia, Marmotinae). (in revision).Hoffmann, Robert S.

1 984 An Ecological and Zoogeographical Analysisof Animal Migration across the Bering Land Bridge inthe Cenozoic. In Beringia in the Cenozoic. V.L.Kontrimaviuchus, ed. Pp. 464-81. Washington, DC:U. S. Department of the Interior and the National Sci-ence Foundation.

Huxley, Julian S., ed.

1940 The New Systematics. London: Oxford Univer-sity Press.

1943 Evolution, the Modern Synthesis. New York:

Harper and Brothers.Mayr, Ernst

1942 Systematics and the Origin of Species. New York:

Columbia University Press.Mcllhenny, Edward A.

1 904 The Nelicatar of Arctic Alaska. The Great Feastofthe Whale. Century MagazineSS: 701-5. New York.Merriam, C. Hart

1918 Review of the Grizzly and Big Brown Bears ofNorth America (Genus Ursus) with Description of aNew Genus, Vetularctos. In North American Fauna,vol. 41. Washington, DC: Gov. Printing Office.

Musser, Guy G., and Michael D. Carleton

1 992 Family Muridae. In Mammal Species of theWorld, 2nd Edition. D.E. Wilson and D.M. Reeder, eds.Pp. 501-755. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institu-tion Press.

Reig, Santiago, ed.

1998 Abstracts. Euro-American Mammal Congress.

Universidade de Santiago de Compostela.Stone, Andrew J.

1900 Some Results of a Natural History Journey toNorthern British Columbia, Alaska, and the NorthwestTerritory, in the Interest ofthe American Museum ofNatural History. Bulletin ofthe American Museum ofNatural History 1 3:31-62.Stone, Witmer

1900 Report on the Birds and Mammals Collectedby the Mcllhenny Expedition to Pt. Barrow, Alaska.Proceedings ofthe Academy of Natural Sciences 52:4-49. Philadelphia.Wiley, Edward O.

1981 Phylogenetics. The Theory and Practice ofPhylogenetic Systematics. New York: John Wiley andSons, Inc.Zagorodnyuk, Igor V.

1990 Kariotipicheskaia izmenchivost' isistematika serykh polevok (Rodentia, Arvicolini).Soobshchenie 1. Vidovoi sostav i khromosomnyechisia (Karyotypic Variation and Systematics ofGray Voles. Communication 1. Species Composi-tion and Chromosome Numbers). Vestnik Zoologii2:26-37. Moscow.

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209

*y!ie Languages of the fNjorth pacific j^im,1 55^7" ' 997> snd the Jesup xpedition

MICHAEL E. KRAUSS

Throughout most of our historical perspective the con-nection between the "Old World" and the new has beenthe Atlantic European expansion westward since 1492.This movement has by now almost completely oblit-erated the aboriginal connection, culminating in thecontrol of the North Pacific area by distant Moscowand Washington, and a Cold War which utterly sealedoff that connection for the lifetime of most of us nowliving. This period also minimized contact betweenscientists on both sides, and greatly intensified the pro-cesses that have been destroying what remains of theindigenous cultures and languages along that entireNorth Pacific arc.

The understanding of the relationship betweenthe two hemispheres and its history that the JesupExpedition promised only reached its beginning stages.Except for the Russian Ryabushinski Expedition of1909-11 across the Aleutian-Kamchatkan arc, the JNPEremained unique; and all further work was severely lim-ited by the political situation of 1917-90. After thistragic lapse, the scientific and social issues surround-ing the Jesup Expedition remain, and even have devel-oped new importance, including the question of sur-vival of these cultures and languages and their role inthe society of the future.

This paper lists the eighty languages of the NorthPacific rim; describes the texture of that diversity;summarizes their status from robust viability to ex-tinction during the century 1897-1997; the causes ofthat situation, including American and Russian politics.

often in contrast; the role of Jesup Expedition field-workers in documenting the diversity; and the issuesof the social responsibility of the scientist. It also dealswith the critically endangered state of most of theselanguages today (with twenty already extinct, and allthe rest, except for around three to five, with speakersof the older generation only), as part of the globalcrisis of impending mass language extinction.

Definitions: Jesup Area Languages

I shall here first present my definition of the JesupExpedition area for language purposes, as a frame-work for a quick survey and statistical overview of theindigenous languages in the North Pacific arc, and oftheir viability status then and now. For these purposes,I shall consider the languages along the coast, on saltwater, from the Columbia River on the American sideto the Ussuri River on the Asian—Astoria toVladivostok—and secondarily also the first tier inland(up to about 500 kilometers).'

As we well know, counting languages as opposedto dialects is often arbitrary and artificial, but in termsof the mutual intelligibility criterion and according tothe best current statements,^ from the Columbia tothe Ussuri in 1897 there was up to eighty differentNative languages spoken, or, at least still remembered,on the coast and first tier inland.

I shall not detail the considerations defining thelanguages listed here, but only shall note that my defi-nition of languages is somewhat finer, especially on

2 1 1

the Asian side, than that established in the Russianliterature.^ For example, Ainu is (or was) two languages(Kurile including Hokkaido, and Sakhalin); Nivkh is two;Yukagir is (or was) perhaps four; Asiatic Eskimo is (was)three; Kerek-Koryak-Alyutor is three; Itelmen is (was)three; and Arman Tungusic is counted separately. Onthe other hand, I have been perhaps overgenerous inretaining the established (Russian) count for PrimorskiTungusic languages, with Negidal, Ulch and Orochtreated as separate from Evenk and Nanay (followingDoerferl 978), though Kill is not counted here becauseit is further inland than Nanay. By some counts, then,the Asian languages could be a lot fewer; but I ammaking a special effort to differentiate evenhandedlyfor both sides—a difficult task, where I hope I am notovercompensating for under-differentiation on the Rus-sian side.

Diversity

Though the arc as defined is almost symmetrical(actually, Vladivostok is about 300 kilometers furthersouth than Astoria) and the Asian side, at least grosslyviewed, (including Kamchatka and Sakhalin) appearsto have much more coastline than the American, thereare significantly more languages and greater diversityon the American side than on the Asian. Fifty-three ofthe eighty area languages are American, and onlytwenty-seven are Asian (Tables 7 and 8), even with thefineness or generosity just allowed for the Asian. (Over-lap is eliminated by calling St. Lawrence Island part ofAsia, and by including the Aleut of the CommanderIslands with American Aleut, and Big Diomede Inupiaqwith Little Diomede.) The diversity is, at most, onlyslightly greater on the American side, however, in termsof different genetic language families represented—amuch deeper measure of diversity: eight families onthe American side (Chinookan, Salishan, Chemakuan,Wakashan, Tsimshianic, Haida, Athabaskan-Eyak-Tlingit, and Eskimo-Aleut), and six on the Asian (Es-kimo-Aleut—due to the presence of three Siberian YupikInguages—also Chukotko-Kamchatkan, Yukagiric,

Tungusic, Nivkh and Ainu). That could, in fact, be madeseven and seven, since it is arguable that Kamchatkanand Chukotkan are genetically different,''and thatTsimshianic is genetically related to Chinookan.^ I thinkalso that in a global perspective, the density of diver-sity here is below average for pre-agrarian parts of theworld in terms of area, but not per capita, and thediversity is greater on both sides in the more southerlylatitudes.

The diversity is greater along the coast than on thefirst inland tier: of the eighty total, fifty-eight are coastal,and only twenty-two are first tier inland. Most diverseis the American coast, with thirty-six, followed by theAsian coast, with twenty-two; then the American in-land with seventeen; and last the Asian inland, withonly five (and that by counting Yukagiric in 1897 asfour languages).

Viability Status 1897

We now come to the issue of viability status and fate ofthese North Pacific languages. By viability I mean, mostessentially, that the language is being transmitted bythe traditional natural method of speaking it to the chil-dren as their first language.*^ Sheer numbers is a majorfactor in language power and language survival; but thelanguage of 100 people, including all the children, willprobably remain alive longer than the language of100,000, including no children.

In ] 897, most of the eighty North Pacific languageswere still viable, learned as a first language by all ormost children. (This we can judge from the subsequentand current situation, by projecting backwards; theaccounts of the time seldom make mention of vi-abilty.) On the Asian side the main exceptions wereSouth ltelmen^ already very nearly extinct, replacedby Russian; also probably Omok and Chuvan Yukagiric,if not already extinct,** replaced by Russian or Chukchi;and on the American side, two widely separateAthabaskan languages mainly by near extinction ofthe group, Tsetsaut^ and Kwalhioqua,'° and probablyalso Chemakum." These six languages must all have

2 1 2

PEOPLE, ANIMALS, AND LAND/ LANGUAGES

been extinct by about 1935.

Of the remaining seventy-four, about eight morewere by then reduced to such small numbers, and/orwere being learned by so few or no children, that theywould have been rather moribund in 1897: Kurile Ainuconfined on Shikotan Island and languishing;'^ ArmanTungusic on Siberian mainland;'^ probably alsoPentlatch,Nooksack and Twana Salishan; and Lower and Cath-lamet Chinook in North America.''' All of these becameextinct during the last half of the last century. North-east Kamchadal probably belongs in this category, butreports are contradictory, and it could conceivably be-long in the next category.'^

By 1897, at least eleven more languages wereentering a precarious state: Kerek"' in dwindlingnumbers; Sirenikski Eskimo'''assimilating toChaplinski;TagishAthabaskan'** assimilating to Inland Tlingit; Eyak'^first assimilating to Tlingit and by 1897 overwhelmedby American canneries; and Southern Tsimshian assimi-lating to Coast Tsimshian. With the death of ValentinaWye, the last speaker, in February 1997, SirenikskiEskimo was the sixteenth of the eighty to becomeextinct, now leaving sixty-four languages still with us;Eyak and Tagish each have one remaining speaker,while Kerek and Southern Tsimshian^" reportedly eachhave two. The last children taught Ainu on Sakhalinwere born about 1905 (those on Hokkaido not muchlater); Sakhalin Ainu is now extinct (Hokkaido very nearlyso). Furthermore in Washington state Lower and UpperChehalis, Cowlitz, Quinault, and Quileute were not muchlonger to be learned by any children, and all have fromtwo to five speakers at present.

In 1897, the other fifty-five may still have appearedfairly robust, with all or most of the children being raisedspeaking them. Here, however, we come to a sharpcontrast in conditions on the American side as op-posed to the Russian.^'

Indigenous Language Policy and Results, 1997

On the American side (Table 7), heavy Euro-Americansettlement and development was already advanced.

especially in Washington State and British Columbia,and generally more advanced than the Russian on theAsian side. However, the federal Indian languagepolicy for the school system, a rigid policy alreadywell established along the entire American coast inboth the United States and Canada, still had more im-pact on the viability of the languages themselves. Thepolicy called for strict speaking of English only; chil-dren were punished for speaking a Native language.Though there was still missionary support for usingNative languages (by Russian Orthodox, Moravian, An-glican-Episcopal, Roman Catholic Oblates and Jesuits),including in written form and printed books, the pro-language mission policy was rapidly losing out tothe mainstream Protestant-led federal policy." The rigidEnglish-only policy was powerfully reinforced, inciden-tally, by the assimilationism so urgently needed to dealwith vast hordes of "barely white" immigrants whonow poured in not from Northern or Western Europe,but from Southern and Eastern Europe.

In contrast, Russian demographic pressure wasminimal on the Asian side, and hardly increasing. It wasso far behind the American that Chukotka, for example,was more American than Russian;" the schools weregenerally far fewer if present at all, and were not moti-vated by any deliberate policy to eliminate indigenouslanguages. Ironically, even the influence of the RussianOrthodox Church was far stronger in Alaska than inRussia. Orthodox support for Alaskan languages, evenprinting materials in four of them and nothing in theAsian languages, provided some significant opposi-tion to the American policy,^'' while on the Asianside there was no policy to oppose. Such was thecontrasting context on the two sides for the JesupExpedition era. We shall return to this after a briefaccount of development since then.

The American anti-Native language policy reignedsupreme for about sixty years, from 1 91 0 to 1 970,until generally there were no more Native-speakingschoolchildren to punish. By 1 970, along the Pacificcoast from California to the Aleutians the only elemen-

M. E. KRAUSS

2 1 3

tary schools where young children could speak any ofthese languages were at Atka (Aleut) and English Bay(Chugach Alutiiq). Further North, the youngest Nativespeakers on the American side are for the central partof Central Yup'ik, seventeen of sixty-seven villages, andSt. Lawrence Island Yupik, in two villages. Liberalizationof the policy began only in the 1970s, too late to help inmost cases in the United States or Canada."

On the Russian side, the Revolutionary regime tookover the Russian Far East in the 1920s and establishedschools for indigenous communities, reaching most bythe 1 930s, with a policy that was basically favorablefor indigenous languages, for populist-idealistic or cyni-cal reasons, or perhaps both. Languages were more orless officially recognized and defined, with literary stan-dards for some, often disregarding divergent dialector even language-level differences, for practical rea-sons (e.g., Sakhalin Nivkh, Naukan Yupik).Several lan-guages, or at least parts thereof, were relatively wellserved in the printing of school literature from the 1930sthrough the 1950s; such as Siberian Yupik Eskimo (withover 100 titles for 1,200 total population, best percapita, but in Chaplinski Yupik only), or Chukchi (460titles for 12,000 people), Nanay (217 titles, 10,000people), Evenk (25,000 people, 400 titles, probablyone dialect only). Even (12,000, 190 titles), Koryak(7,100, 117 titles, Chavchuven dialect only). However,far less well served were Nivkh (4,000 people, 20 titles,Amur dialect only?)." (West) Itelmen (1,200 people) gotonly the bare beginnings (1 932 primerand arithmetic),and for 300 Commander Island Aleut a primer anddictionary were drafted but not published (in BeringAtkan language). Several other recognized languagesstill spoken by schoolchildren at the time, but withpopulations under 1,000, got no books: Yukagir, Ulch,Oroch, Negidal, and Orok. Also, the degree to whichthe books were properly distributed or really used isinconsistent and questionable. In any case, the policyand practice were favorable enough that the Soviet-side languages remained quite generally viablethrough the period 1930-60,^^ the same period when

2 1 4

American parents, now bilingual in English, switchedto speaking English with their children, as instructed.

The Soviet literatures in indigenous languages firstadapted the Latin alphabet of International Commu-nism, but were Cyrillicized already in 1 937. World WarII, the Great Patriotic War, increased Russian activityand development in the Far East, along with Russiannationalism. Finally, and most devastatingly, in about1 957 came ukrupnenie{WWage consolidation") with thedestruction of the many smaller villages, and above allintematy{hoard'mg schools) in the consolidated villages,severely restricting children's contact with their par-ents and following a de facto policy of Russification,^^in some cases even making a point of burning thenative-language books.^° The result of this abrupt anddisastrous change in the 1960s and 1970s, ironicallyat the same time that American policy began to liber-alize, is that now only Chukchi may have a significantproportion of children speakers in some less settledgroups. Evenk probably also has some young speak-ers in the Amur-Chita region; Koryak and Even perhapsalso in some pockets; Nanay perhaps a few childrensomewhere. But for all other Russian-side languagesthe youngest speakers are now in their thirties or older.''

There are ironic contrasts in the timing; replace-ment by English occurred mostly 1930-1960 whilethe Russian policy was liberal, then the replacementby Russian occurred while American policy liberalized.

The result is that of the fifty-five languages thatmight have appeared robust in 1897 (thirty-six on theAmerican side, nineteen on the Russian), only two maystill be viable or partly so on the American side (CentralAlaskan Yup'ik and St. Lawrence Island Siberian Yupik;Table 7), only three or four on the Russian have anychildren speakers (Chukchi, Evenk, Koryak, perhaps alsoEven), and the status of even these most-favored lan-guages is extremely endangered (Table 8). The lessendangered Native languages of the North are all quitedistant from the «Jesup arc»: almost all Greenlandicand East Canadian Inuit; Tundra Nenets, Northern andEastern Khanty in Russia; Northern Saami in Scandinavia;

PEOPLE, ANIMALS, AND LAND/ LANGUAGES

and Dogrib or South Slavey in Canada. These are notto be compared with Sakha (Yakut), which has threeor four times as many speakers as all other Northernlanguages combined, placing it in an entirely differentclass of languages in this respect.^^

Social Responsibility of the Scientist, andthe Global Language Extinction Issue

What did Boas, Jochelson, Bogoras, and their colleguesthink, if anything, about the future of these languagesin 1897? First though, I take 1897 and the JesupExpedition merely as symbolic of the larger effort andcareers of these men, in the field from the 1 880s tothe 1920s, right while the fate of the American Nativelanguages (but not yet that of the Russian) was beingsealed, or prepared. The extent or intensity of theirlinguistic fieldwork hardly even peaked during the JesupExpedition time; they may have done more before and/or after it than on it. Second, I need to emphasize thatthey did not document all of the eighty languagesduring their longer career period, and far fewer stillduring JNPE surveys, which skipped Alaska altogether,a huge "keystone" of the North Pacific arc. In fact,coverage was much spottier on the American side,where two-thirds of the languages are located.

How much solid survey-like knowledge the JNPEteam members had of what languages and dialectswere in the area in 1897 or 1902 is quite unclear.Whether they were or were not interested in a regionaloverview, such an overview was in any case ratherimpossible with the transportation facilities of the time(some of their travel was quite heroic, to achieve whatthey did under those circumstances), with limited re-sources, and with Boas' strict rule over the plans. Asfor last-minute salvage of dying languages for linguis-tic science, in the interest of comparative linguistics orphilology, only Boas appears to have given much pri-ority to that, and during the JNPE even Boas disregardedthat priority, as his interest clearly centered on docu-menting indigenous life in its oldest "purest" form, whilelanguages were still alive and fully functioning.

Finally, insofar as the JNPE funding was through amuseum, with a natural priority on collecting materialobjects, it is indeed remarkable that so much languagework got done, thanks to the interest, linguistic skill,and hard work of these men.

I now come to the question of the social responsi-bility of the scientist, as a humanist and human being,then and now. Taking only the central examples I knowof best—Boas, Jochelson, and Bogoras—I am struck,even shocked, that as revolutionaries, discoverersof cultural relativism, they wrote so little in theirJNPEcontributions to protest or even express regretabout the then very active colonial suppression ofthe languages and cultures. They hardly said anddid anything to oppose the decline of the languagesand cultures they were documenting. Perhaps it was"scientific detachment" above all, or assumption thatthe disappearance of those languages and cultureswas inevitable, or that there was nothing they them-selves could do about it anyway, especially as tran-sient outsiders and foreigners. Or perhaps it was somecombination of the above. I have myself noted littleor no trace of regret: Bogoras did not have muchexposure to American suppression, butjochelson cer-tainly did, in the Aleutians 1909-10, but there is not aword about it even in his correspondence. Boas, like-wise, left no written word that I have seen—exceptperhaps to his wife about the banning of the KwakiutIpotlatch, or late in life a general thought about cultureloss—about language suppression or loss. Jochelsonhad converted fully, from revolutionary to scientist, neverto return. His old friend Bogoras, on the other hand,was ever the revolutionary and activist, and, insteadof fleeing Russia after the October Revolution of 191 7,he became, among other things, founding director ofthe Leningrad Institute for the development of North-ern minority languages in education (Institut NarodovSevera).

On the American side, one thing that Boas and hiscolleagues could realistically have done was to havehelped resident pro-language missionaries to develop

M. E. KRAUSS

2 1 5

Table 7/North American Languages Current Status, Sequenced from the Columbia River toward the Bering Strait

CoastalLanguages

Fam.

Status

Speakers

TotalPop.

Lower

e 1930

0

Chinook

Lower

S

>d

<5

200

Chehalis

Quinault

S

>d

<6

1,500

Lushootseed

S

<d

60

2,000

Twana

S

e 1 980

0

350

Clallam

s

d

<20

3,000?

Quileute

Chm

>d

3

784

Chemakum

Chm

e>1928

0

0

Makah

W

c

50?

1,000

Nitinaht

w

>c

20

500?

Nootka

w

c

500?

5,000?

Northern

s

<d

<30

3,000

Straits

Nooksack

s

e 1 958

0

350

Halkomelem

s

<d/>c ?

50?

7,000

Squamish

s

d

<20

2,300

Pentlatch

s

e 1 940

0

55

Sechelt

s

>c

40

700

Comox

s

<c

300

1,000

Bella Coola

s

>c

50

700

KwakiutI

w

c

400?

4,000?

Heiltsuk-

w

c

300

1,500

Oowekyala

Haisia

w

c

1 00

1,000

Southern

>d

2

Tsimshian

Coast

b-d

500

4,500

Tsimshian

Nass-Gitksan

b-d

1,000

5,500

Tsimshian

Tsetsuat

AET

e 1 934

0

1 0

Southern

D

10

500

Haida

Northern

<d

40

1,700

Haida

Tlingit

AET

c-d

575

1 1,000

Eyak

AET

>d

1

Alutiiq

EA

b-c

400

3,000

Tanaina

AET

b-d

75

900

Central

EA

a-c

10,000 21,000

Alaskan Yup'ik

Aleut

EA

b-d

300

2,200

Inupiaq

EA

c

500

3,200'

2 1 6

InlandLanguages

Fam

^ La L U J

TnralPop.

Kwalhioqua

AET

e>1923

0

0

Cathlamet

e 1930

0

Chinook

Cowlitz

S

>d

2

200

Upper

S

>d

2

200

Chehalis

Columbian

S

C

75

500

Thompson

S

c

<500

3,000

Lillooet

S

c

300

2,800

Chilcotin

AET

>b

1,000

2,000

Carrier

AET

a-c

2,400

5,000

Babine

AET

B?

200-300? 2,000?

Sekani

AET

C

100

500

Tahltan

AET

>c

40

1,200

Tagish

>d

1

Southern

AET

c

200

1,400

Tutchone

Ahtna

AET

c

80

500

Upper

AET

>b

40

160

Kuskokwim

Koyukon

AET

c

300

2,300

PEOPLE, ANIMALS, AND LAND/ LANGUAGES

Table 8/ Northeastern Asian Languages Current Status, Sequenced from the Bering Strait toward the Ussuri River

CoastalLanguages

Fam.

Status

Speakers TotalPop.

Naukan Yupik

EA

c

60

400

Central Siberian

EA

a-c

1,300

2,300

Yupik

Sirenik Yupik

EA

e 1997

0

Chukchi

ChK

a-b

10,000

1 5,000

Kerek

ChK

>d

2

400

Koryak

ChK

a-c

2,500

7,000

Alyutor

ChK

c

200

2,000

Even

T

a-c

<7,500

17,000

Arman Tungus

T

e 1960

0

—

Northeast

ChK

e? 1950

0'

—

Itelmen

South Itelmen

ChK

e 1910

0

—

West Itelmen

ChK

e 1986

70

1,500

Amur Nivkh

c-d

100

2,000

Sakhalin Nivkh

c

300

2,700

Negidal

T

c

<100

500

Ulch

T

c

<500

3,200

Oroch

T

c

100

900

Orok

T

c

35

300

Udegey

T

c-d

100

1,600'

Kurile Ainu

e 1960

0

0

Hokkaido-

e 1986

0

3^

Sakhalin Ainu

Inland Fam.

Status

Speakers

Total

Languages

Pop.

Chuvan Yukagir

e<1900

0

"1,300'

Omok Yukagir

e<1900

0

Tundra Yukagir

c-d

50

600

Kolyma Yukagir

d

20

300

Evenk T a-c 9,000 30,000

Nanay T c <2,000- <2,000-

12,000' 12,000'

Abbreviations used in Tables 7 and 8:Status:

a all generations including childrenb parental generation and upc grandparental generation and up

d small number of very old speakerse extinct, with approximate date of extinction

< in a situation approaching a particular status> beyond the situation described for a particularstatus

X- Y Communities within the language area range instatus from one status to another.

Footnotes for Tables 7 and 8:

' Seward Peninsula only; Northern Alaska, Canada and Greenland not counted

^ Russia only, China and Mongolia not counted

^ Russia only, China not counted

" Sakhalin only, Hokkaido not counted

Language families:

AET Athabaskan-Eyak-Tlingit

EA Eskimo-Aleut

ChK Chukotka-Kamchatkan

Chm Chemakuan

S Salishan

T Tungusic

W Wakashan

M. E. KRAUSS

21 7

better orthographies. But Boas evidently had littleuse for missionaries of any kind, and they consequentlyfor him—a lost opportunity.

As for a conclusion, I can only offer my personalview, which has motivated my whole career. It wouldbe a tragedy if these Native minority languagesdisappear, not just for linguistics, or ethnohistory, orfor science, or for human rights, or for these peoplesthemselves; but their loss would be a tragedy, I claim,for humanity at large. We have come to understandbiologically that our physical survival depends utterlyon a certain condition of the biosphere, the ecosys-tem biodiversity, that we need desperately to learn topreserve and not to destroy. I believe it is the samewith human cultural, linguistic, and intellectual diver-sity. Diversity itself also constitutes a system of itsown, which I call our "logosphere," the web of intellec-tual life that is our very humanity. We obviously havethe power now to destroy that too, and are do-ing so at an explosive rate, globally." We must learnto control the growth of English-, Spanish-, Chinese-,Russian-, even Yakut-speaking culture, and see it as asupplement, a merely practical enrichment to theminority indigenous ones. We must prevent this un-necessary destruction of all other languages in the pathof that development, or we destroy the complex andbeautifully diverse system upon which our survival ashuman beings depends. That is my claim.

Therefore, for us here now, it is our job to docu-ment and preserve, but also to protest where still nec-essary, to intervene, and to help support efforts tomaintain or revitalize this heritage, and to make thework of Jesup Expedition researchers on North Pacificlanguages a lasting contribution to that.

Notes

1. Compare the maps in Jesup 1897; Boas1 903, with Krauss 1 988 (reprinted, with some cor-rections in Chaussonnet 1995:109, 1996:108).Coastal is defined as having territory on salt water,or so by default (no other indigenous group inter-vening, e.g., Udegey).

2. See especially Goddard 1996 for the North-west Coast to Alaska, and Krauss 1 997 for Alaskaand the Asian side; also Krasnaia kniga iazykovnarodov Rossii 1 994.

3. See Krauss 1997; Vakhtin 1992:1 3; Al'kor1 932 (especially pp. 48-5 1, 54 ff., 84-7, 1 02-3);Curvich 1985:184; Vdovin 1959:288-91;Mladopis'mennye iazyki narodov SSSR 1959:12;Isaev 1977:246-53.

4. See Volodin 1976:17-9, 1997:12-14.

5. See Tarpent 1 996.

6. I have been estimating the number ofspeakers of Alaskan since 1961 and, later, Sibe-rian languages; results were published first in Krauss1973a, 1973b, but only for Alaska (and borderlanguages, including USSR Eskimo and Aleut), like-wise Krauss 1 974, 1 982 (map); the whole arc mapand table see Krauss 1988 (also Chaussonnet1995, 1996) and especially Krauss 1997.

7. Patkanov (1912 ill: 915, 920) shows thataccording to the 1897 census, one man in thevillage of Apacha spoke Kamchadal, which, if hewas not displaced, would have been SouthernKamchadal. Jochelson in 1910 (191 1:1 39) reportsof Southern Kamchadal that "the last old womanstill remembering that dialect, died shortly before[my] arrival" (no location given). Obviously therewas no careful investigation, but it does seemprobable that speakers of Southern Kamchadalsurviving in 1897-1910 were few and scattered.See below for the status of Northeastern Kamchadal,which may well have been quite different.

8. G.N. Kurilov, personal conversation 1997;see also Jochelson 1934:150 for Chuvan andJochelson 1926:57 for Omok.

9. See Boas and Goddard 1924:1; Krauss1 973a:91 6-7. The last speaker, Jane Dangeli, diedin approximately 1934.

10. See Krauss 1973a:917-8, 1990:531-2.One speaker, Tonamal (Melissa or Blizzy Moxlahor Moxley), was still alive in 1923.

11. See Boas 1892:37, who reported threespeakers in 1890, one of whom, his informantLouise Webster, was still alive in 1 928 (Elmendorf1990:440).

12. Torii 1919:3-5, 15-9; Bergman 1 933:211-7; Murasaki 1 963. Murasaki in 1 962 checkedon seven possible speakers, most of whom prob-ably knew nothing of Kurile Ainu, but general

2 1 8

PEOPLE, ANIMALS, AND LAND/ LANGUAGES

extreme stigma, shame, and reluctance added tothe uncertainty.

13. Doerfer 1978:55; Novikova 1960:20,1968:107, and Sunik 1959:338-9; also JuhaJanhunen personal communication 1993.

14. Thompson and Kinkade 1990:37, 41,also Kinkade p.c. ca. 1995. The last speaker,Charles Cultee, died in the 1930s.

15. Patkanov (1912 111:914, 920) shows thataccording to the 1897 census, 207 of 696Kamchadals in twelve villages in the KamchatkaRiver drainage still spoke (Northeastern) Kam-chadal. More precisely, in seven of those twelvevillages no Kamchadals spoke Kamchadal, in twomore 5% and 6%, while in the rest, most or all (76%,84%, 1 00%) did, in no clear geographical pattern.The Jesup Expedition did not visit the area. More-over, since Kamchadal was surely low-prestige,and a choice between Kamchadal and Russianwas forced in the 1 897 census, it is probable thatthe actual 1897 figure was well above 207. Itseems that no one really investigated, and I con-sider it conceivable that someone might still re-member Northeastern Kamchadal even today.

16. See Leont'iev 1983:12-9; Kibrik(1 991:263) names three speakers, two at Meyny-pil'gyn, for 1 989.

17. See Menovshchikov 1964:7-10, and es-pecially Krupnik 1991, which carefully describesthe whole decline and extinction process, far bet-ter than I have seen for any other language in thearea, or perhaps in the world.

18. Krauss, 1997: 9. Angela Sidney died inthe 1990s, leaving only Lucy Wren (John Ritter,personal communication).

19. Krauss 1997:11-12; Krauss 1982:11-8;de Laguna, 1990:195-196. The one remainingspeaker, Marie Smith Jones, 80, was still alive in1 998.

20. Marie-Lucie Tarpent 1997. SouthernTsimshian is probably the last "language" in theJesup area to be "discovered" by John Dunn around1975; see Dunn 1979:62-3.

21. For the Russian side in 1897, see espe-cially Patkanov 1 91 2, a remarkable and importantsource.

22. See, for example, Krauss 1980:18-24,94-6; also Alton 1998, a dissertation that exten-sively documents U. S. Federal and Alaska Native

language policy and its effects, for Alaska; andLevine and Cooper 1976 for British Columbia, animportant source.

23. See, for example Hunt 1975; Krauss1994:366; Vdovin 1965:258-62.

24. See, for example Krauss 1980:15-7,1 990:206-1 1, for Alaska; and Vdovin 1 965:258-62 for failure of missions to the Chukchi.

25. Krauss 1980:21-4, 95-7; 1997:5-19, 23-34; Thompson and Kinkade 1990.

26. Vakhtin 1992:13-4; Al'kor 1932, espe-cially pp. 48-9, 56-7, 102-3.

27. These counts were done in large part bymyself, in 1 990, with kind permission from GalinaSergeevna Mishchenko to enter the stacks at theLeningrad Public Library annex at Kupchino for eth-nic literatures, an official depository for all suchpublications, where I simply counted the itemsfor each language present.

28. See e.g., Savoskul 1978, especially pp.145-8; Avrorin 1970; Chichio 1985:80.

29. Vakhtin 1992:17-23; Krauss 1980:47-9.

30. G. A. Menovshchikov, L. Aynana, and oth-ers, personal communications 1985, 1990; seealso Chichio 1990: 55.

31. Krauss ] 997:] 3-9, 27-34; Krasnaia knigaiazykov narodov Rossii 1994:69, 32, 70, 37, andespecially personal communications of ToshiroTsumagari, Viktor Atknin 1994.

32. For circumpolar overview and viabilitystatus of all Northern languages, see Krauss 1997.

33. I have written a number of articles aboutthe impending global collapse of linguistic diver-sity, e.g., Krauss 1 992, 1 996.

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1973b Eskimo-Aleut. Current Trends in Linguistics10(2):796-902. The Hague: Mouton.

1974 Native Peoples and Languages of Alaska. Map.Fairbanks: Alaska Native Language Center. (2nd ed.,1984).

1 980 Alaska Native Languages: Past, Present, andFuture. ANLC Research Papers 4. Fairbanks: AlaskaNative Language Center.

1982 In Honor of Eyak. Fairbanks: Alaska NativeLanguage Center.

1988 Many Tongues—Ancient Tales. In Cross-roads of Continents: Cultures of Siberia andAlaska. William W. Fitzhugh and Aron Crowell,eds. Pp. 144-50.Washington, DC: Smithsonian In-stitution.

1 990 Kwalhioqua and Clatskanie. In NorthwestCoast. Wayne Suttles, ed. Handbook of North Ameri-can Indians, vol. 7. Pp. 530-2. Washington, DC:Smithsonian Institution.

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1 992 The World's Languages in Crisis. Languages68(1):4-10.

1 996 Linguistics and Biology: Threatened Linguisticand Biological Diversity Compared. CLS (ChicagoLinguistic Society) 32:69-75.

1997 The Indigenous Languages of the North: aReport on Their Present State. In Northern MinorityLanguages: Problems of Survival. Hiroshi Shoji andJuhajanhunen, ed. Senri Ethnological Studies 44:1-34. Osaka, Japan: National Museum of Ethnology.

Krupnik, Igor

1 991 Extinction of the Sirenikski Eskimo Language:

1895-1960. Etudes/lnuit/Studies 1 5(2):3-22.Leont'ev, Vladilen V.

1983 Etnografiia i fofklor kerekov(Jhe Kerek: TheirEthnography and Folklore). Magadan: Magadanskoeknizhnoe izdatel'tsvo.

Levine, Robert, and Freda Cooper

1976 The Suppression of British Columbian Lan-guages: Filling in the Gaps in the DocumentaryRecord. Sound Heritage 4i3~^)A3-7S. Victoria, B.C.

Mladopis'mennye iazyki

1959 Mladopis' mennye iazyki narodov SSSR.

Leningrad: Institut iazykoznaniia AN SSSR.Murasaki, Kyoko

1 963 Report on the Extinction of the Kurile-AinuLanguage. Minzokugaku-Kenkyu27(A):S\-A(mJapa-nese).

Novikova, Klavdia A.

1 960 Ocherki dialektov evenskogo iazyka {Essays onthe Dialects of the Even Language). Moscow: NaukaPublishers.

1 968 Evenskii iazyk (The Even Language). Iazyki naro-dov SSSR, 5:88-108. Leningrad: Nauka Publishers.Patkanov, Serafim K.

1912 Staticheskie dannye pokazyvaiushchie ple-mennoi sostav naseleniia Sibiri, iazyk i rodyinorodtsev (na osnovanii dannykh spetsial'noirazrabotki ma-teriala perepisi 1897 g.) (StatisticalData on the Tribal Composition of the SiberianNatives, Their Languages, and Clans, Based Uponthe Records of the 1897 Census). Vol.3. Zapiskiimperatorskogo russkogo geograficheskogoobshchestva 11 (3). St. Petersburg.

Savoskul', Sergei S.

1 978 Social and Cultural Dynamics of the Peoplesof the Soviet North. Polar Record 19(119): 1 28-52.Sunik, O. P.

1959 Tunguso-man'chzhurskie iazyki (The Tungus-Manchu Languages). In: Mladopis'mennye iazykinarodov SSSR. Pp. 318-51. Leningrad: AN SSSR.

Tarpent, Marie-Lucie

1 996 Reattaching Tsimshianic to Penutian. In: Pro-ceedings of the Hokan-Penutian Workshop. Survey ofCalifornia and Other Indian Languages, 9.

Thompson, Laurence C, and Dale Kinkade

1 990 Languages. In: Northwest Coast. Wayne Suttles,ed. Handbook of North American Indians, vol. 7. Pp.30-51. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution.

Torii, Ryuzo

1919 Les Ainou des lies Kouriles. Journal of the Col-lege of Science, Tokyo Imperial University 42:]-337,plates.

Vakhtin, Nikolai B.

1992 Native Peoples of the Russian Far North. Lon-don: Minority Rights Group.Vdovin, Innokentii S.

1959 Obshchie svedeniia o sozdanii pis'mennostina iazykakh narodov Severa (The Creation of Lit-eracy for the Minority Languages of the Peoplesof the North: General Review). In: Mladopis'mennyeiazyki narodov SSSR. Pp. 284-99. Leningrad: ANSSSR.

1965 Ocherki istorii i etnografii Chukchei(Essays inthe History and Ethnography of the Chukchi).Leningrad: Nauka Publishers.

Volodin, Aleksandr P.

1976 IteI'menskii iazyk (The Itelmen Language).

Leningrad: Nauka Publishers.1997 Chukotsko-kamchatskie iazyki mira (The

Chukchi-Kamchatka Languages). In Paleoaziatskie

iazyki. Pp.1 2-22. Moscow: Indrik.Worth, Dean Stoddard

1960 Russian Borrowing in Kamchadal. Orbis9(1):83-109.

M. E. KRAUSS

22 1

54/Waldemar Jochelson, Norman Buxton, and Waldemar Bogoras in San Francisco before their departurefor Siberia, spring 1900. Studio photo (AMNI-i 38343)

223

55/ Norman C. Buxton in Cizhiga, Siberia, flanked by the local Russian officer and his secretary, Spring 1901(AMNH 22089)

224

57/ Shestakova, a Koryak winter settlement at Penzhina Bay, Siberia, winter 190i. Norman Buxton,photographer (AMNH 22065)

225

58/Native dog-teams in Markovo, Anadyr River valley, winter 1901. Norman Buxton,photographer (AMNH 22053)

59/ The town of Markovo, Anadyr River valley, winter 1901. Norman Buxton, photographer (AMNH22051)

226

60/ Mr. Nikolai Sokolniliov, commanding officer of the Anadyr District, with Nativechildren. Markovo, winter 1901. Norman Buxton, photographer (AMNH 22054)

61/Dried salmon on the sled, used for both human and dog food. Markovo, winter 1901.Norman Buxton, photographer (AMNH 22065; AMNH 22055)

227

62/ A group of Yakut (Sakha) children, 1902. Photographer, Waldemar Jochelson (AMNH 11015)

228

229

64/ltelmen poet Anatoly Levkovsky, with his wife Tatiana and son Nikolai. Photographer, Nelson Hancock

230

65/Respected Itelmeti elder and educator, Tatiana Petrovna Lukashkina was bornin the village of Sopochnoe. She remembered fondly growing up there under thetutelageof her blind grandmother, Maria Vasil'evna Pavlutskaia. Photographer,Nelson Hancock

66/ The village ofKovran in 1994 from across the Kovran River. Photographer, Ingrid Summers

67/Store closed, Verkhne Khairiuzovo, February, 1994. This became an increasingly frequent occurrence. It was some-times rumored that the store was closed during usual opening hours because of the drunkenness of the storekeeper. Butit also began to be closed simply because there was nothing to sell. This store owned by the Fishing Cooperative wententirely out of business. Photographer, David Koester

mmm

232

68/The remains of the Kovran clubhouse (dom kul'turyj. Photographer, David Koester

69/ The village of Verkhne Khairiuzovo, summer of 1992. Photographer, David Koester

233

234

71/ltelmen elders Anastasia (Nadia) Phtchina, Aleksandm Krasnoiarova and Polina Popova from Kovran, at an Itelmengathering in / 995. Photographer, Nelson Hancock

235

236

73/The village ofKirganik, on the Kamchatka River incentral Kamchatka, is another site that indigenouspeoples are re-inhabiting. Closed in the 1960s, Kirganikis now a summer home to a small number of indig-enous Kamchadals, such as Aleksandr Tolman, shownhere in the summer of2001. As the regional economycontinues to worsen, some people are choosing to movepermanently to Kirganik, as it provides better accessto fish and game. Photographer, Nelson Hancock

74/ Afanasii Reshetnikov,another of Kirganik's elderlyresettlers, in front of hishouse. 1997. Photographer,Nelson Hancock

237

75/Family of the Chief of the Tundra Yukagirband, winter 1902. Photographer, Waldemar Jochelson (AMNH / 754).

Cjcnctlc prehi'stom of Paieoasi'atic-speakinropulat,on. of Northeastern S^bena and

their j^eiationships to f\jative /Xmericans

THEODORE G.SCHURRAND DOUGLAS C. WALLACE

Franz Boas initiated the first systematic exploration ofthe population relationships across Bering Strait withthe launch of thejesup North Pacific Expeditions (JNPE)of 1897-1902. Assuming that the ancestral home ofthe American Indians was Asia, Boas was eager toestablish the links between aboriginal groups residingin Siberia and the New World, and to elucidate theprocesses by which these relationships developed. Tothis end, the JNPE collected an enormous amount ofcultural and linguistic data from populations inhabit-ing the northern regions of both sides of the NorthPacific, including folk tales, grammars, songs, artifacts,masks, boats, dwellings, and clothing (Crowell 1988;Fitzhugh 1988; Curvich 1988; Krupnik 1988; Rousselotet al. 1988). The similarities in folklore, shamanisticpractices, cultural traditions, types of dwellings, deco-rative motifs, and languages across Bering Strait con-vinced Boas (1903, 1905), Bogoras (1902), and Jochel-son (1908, 1926) that northeastern Siberians weremuch closer to American Indians than to other Asian/Siberian peoples.

Furthermore, Boas believed that the physicaldifferences between populations would reveal theirrelationships in the present, which, in turn, wouldrefiect their origins and relationships in the past (Boas1912, 1928). To test these ideas. Boas and his col-leagues took measurements of body and facial fea-tures of thousands of individuals from dozens ofethnic populations within a 10-year span (Boas 1905;Jantz et al. 1 992; Ousley and Jantz 2001). From thesedata, they concluded that populations of the North

Pacific constituted a single racial type which originatedfrom a common cultural and linguistic tradition thatwas formerly more widespread than at present, en-compassing Northeast Asia, Alaska, and the NorthwestCoast of North America (Boas 1905, 1912, 1928;Jochelson 1926). However, the exact links betweenSiberian and Northwest Coast populations and theEskimo were less clear, with the Aleut falling some-where in the middle of the two geographic extremes.

Based on these findings. Boas proposed that an-cient Asians initially migrated across a land bridge toAmerica, and were subsequently cut off for a longperiod of time by glaciers, thereby allowing the differ-entiation of the distinctive and heterogeneous Ameri-can physical types. Later, when the glaciers retreated,the land bridge was opened up again and Americansflowed back into Asia until they met "Mongoloid" popu-lations migrating from the south and west, a conceptwhich became known as the "Americanoid" theory(Bogoras 1902; Jochelson 1908; Boas 1912, 1928). Inthis model, the back migration of American culturesfrom east to west across the North Pacific producedthe Chukchi, Koryak, Kamchadal, Yukagir and Nivkh(Gilyak) (Boas 1905). The peoples on either side ofthe North Pacific were then separated at Bering Straitby the intrusion of the Eskimo, a people who wereculturally and morphologically distinct and purport-edly originated in Central Canada (Boas 1 905, 1912),with further diffusion between northern populationsbeing prevented by this "Eskimo wedge" (Collins 1937;Dumond, this volume).

239

Table 9/ Siberian Populations Analyzed for Genetic Variation

Population

N

n

Field Collection Site(s)

CollectionDate(s)

SampleCollection

Ref

Siberian Yupik

79

79

Anadyr, Providenya, &

1994-5

Sukernik

1

Sireniki; Chukchi Autonomous

District, Magadan Region

Siberian Yupik

>102

70

New Chaplino, Uelen, &

1979-82

Sukernik et al.

2, 3

Sireniki; Chukchi Autonomous

District, Magadan Region

Coast Chukchi

66

66

Anadyr, Providenya, &

1994-5

Sukernik

1

Sireniki; Chukchi Autonomous

District, Magadan Region

Reindeer

515

70

Rytkuchi & Amguyema;

1977-9

Sukernik et al.

3, 4

Chukchi

Chukchi Autonomous District,

Magadan Region; Middle

Pakhachi & Achayvayam;

Koryak Autonomous District,

Kamchatka Region

Koryak

104

104

Tymlat, Ossora, & Karaga;

1993

Schurr and

5

Koryak Autonomous District,

Sukernik

Kamchatka Region

Koryak

51

51

Voyampolka & Kovran; Koryak

1996

Schurr,

5

Autonomous District,

Sukernik &

Kamchatka Region

Starikovskaya,

Itel'men

47

47

Voyampolka & Kovran; Koryak

1996

Schurr,

5

Autonomous District,

Sukernik &

Kamchatka Region

Starikovskaya,

Nivkh

57

57

Nekrasovka & Rybnovsk;

1991

Sukernik and

3

Sakhalin Region

Starikovskaya

Udegey

45

45

Gvaysugi; Primor'ye Region

1992

Sukernik and

3

Starikovskaya

Uichi/Nanay

87

87

Old and New Bulava;

1997

Sukernik and

6

Khabarovsk Region

Starikovskaya

Negidal

14

14

Old Bulava, Vladimirovka;

1996

Sukernik and

6

Khabarovsk Region

Starikovskaya

Yukagir

68

27

Andryushkino & Nelemnoye;

1986-7

Sukernik et al.

3

Yakut-Sakha Republic

Even

375

43

Sebyan-Kujhal & Beryozovka;

1990

Sukernik et al.

3. 7

Yakut-Sakha Republic

Nganasan

700

49

Novaya, Ust-Avam, &

1974-5,

Sukernik et al.

3. 8. 9

Volochanka; Taymyr

1984

Autonomous District,

Krasnoyarsk Region

Evenk

250

51

Suringa & Polygus; Evenk

1991-2

Sukernik et al.

3

Autonomous District,

Krasnoyarsk Region

Northern Altai

30

28

Suronash, Tuloi, & Artybash;

1994

Sukernik and

10

Gorno-Altai Republic

Starikovskaya

Ket

23

23

Sulamai; Evenk Autonomous

1992

Sukernik et al.

10

District, Krasnoyarsk Region

Selkup

50 -

20

Farkovo; Krasnoyarsk Oblast

1990

Sukernik et al.

3,11

TOTALS

2,663

931

Note; 'N' = original number of samples taken during the initial period of field research, and 'n'-number of samplesanalyzed for mtDNA variation. The 'Field Collection Site(s)' are indicated by village then administrative district andregion. 'Ref = References: I = Starikovskaya et al. (1998); 2 = Sukernik and Osipova 0982); 3 « Sukernik et al.(1981); 4 = Torroni et al. (1993b): 5 = Schurr et al. (1999); 6 = Schurr et al. (2000); 7 - Posukh et al. (1990); 8 -Karaphet et al. (1981); 9 = Osipova and Sukernik (1983); 10 = Sukernik et al. (1996); 11 - Sukernik et al. (1992).

240

PEOPLES, ANIMALS, AND LAND/ GENETICS

Although not confirmed through systematic sta-tistical analyses until recently, these preliminary find-ings of the JNPE posed a series of hypotheses aboutSiberian and Native American origins and affinities thathave formed the basis of subsequent studies of popu-lation relationships in this region. What all of theselater analyses have attempted to explicate are the num-ber of migrations or population expansions which en-tered the New World and gave rise to Paleoindians;the timing of these migrations, i.e., how early the Ameri-cas were colonized; and from where in Asia or Siberiathe progenitors of these aboriginal peoples originated.In what follows, we describe how the modern mo-lecular genetic data obtained from aboriginal popula-tions of Siberia, in particular, those from Chukotka andKamchatka, may be used to test the hypotheses aboutthe origins and diversity of eastern Siberians and theirevolutionary relationships with Native Americans thatwere raised in the JNPE investigations (Figs. 62, 63).Although there is a burgeoning literature on Y-chromo-some variation in indigenous Siberians and NativeAmericans, we focus here on mitochondrial DMA(mtDNA) diversity in these populations.

The body of data brought to bear on these ques-tions derives from a large number of anthropologicalgenetic studies conducted among various aboriginalSiberian populations by Dr. Rem I. Sukernik, his col-leagues at the Institute of Cytology and Genetics,Novosibirsk, and his collaborators, over the past twentyyears, including us from Emory University (Table 9). Allof the recent molecular data that are the focus of thispaper were obtained from these samples in the labo-ratory of Dr. Douglas C. Wallace, Center for MolecularMedicine, Emory University. These samples representover a dozen different ethnic groups that occupy awide geographic expanse of northern Asia, with a strongeastern Siberian emphasis. As such, this data set per-mits the direct comparison of molecular genetic infor-mation with the craniometric and anthropometric datathat were collected from many of these same popula-tions by members of the JNPE.

Table 10/ Haplogroups in Native Siberian and East AsianPopulations

ndpiuy ruupb

roiyiilUi pi 1 r\cbiriLiion ^iicb

A

A

■ CCD n

D

D

L.*jii-iKNA' iniergenic y-Dp

□eiciion, + 1 DD I / c

V-

nu

F

-1 2406h/-l 2406o (-9052n/

-9053f), -i-16517e

C

-h4830n/-(-4831f, +1 0394c,

+ 10397a, -h16517e

H

-7025a

Y

+7933j, -8391e, -t-10394c,

-^16517e

Z

-I-10394C, +10397a, -i-l 1074c,

-H1651 7e

Note.' The polymorphic restriction sites are numbered fromthe first nucleotide of the recognition sequence accordingto the published sequence (Anderson et al. 1981). Therestriaion enzymes used in the analysis are designated bythe following single-letter code: a, Alul; c, Ddel; e, Haelll; fHhal; g, Hinfl; h, Hpa/; j, Mbol; n, Haell; o, Hindi. Sitesseparated by a diagonal line indicate either simultaneoussite gains or site losses for two different enzymes, or asite gain for one enzyme and a site loss for another be-cause of a single common nucleotide substitution.

Mitochondrial DNA Variation inPaleoasiatic-speaking Populations

Among Paleoasiatic-speaking populations, six distincthaplogroups have been identified'. These include threeof the five haplogroups observed in Native Americans(A, C, and D), and three additional mtDNA lineages (C,Y, and Z) which are present in Asian populations (Table10)^. Each of these haplogroups is defined by bothrestriction fragment length polymorphisms (RFLPs) andcontrol region (CR) sequence polymorphisms (Table 11),with several different CR sublineages usually presentwithin each haplogroup. The haplogroups and theirconstituent haplotypes, as well as their associatedCR sublineages, have specific distributions in NativeSiberian and Native American populations that sug-gest genetic relationships between them.

Chukotkan Populations

The majority of Chukchi and Siberian Yupik (Eskimo)haplotypes belong to haplogroups A and D (Tables

T. C. SCHURR AND D. C. WALLACE

24 1

Table 1 // CR Sequence Sublimeages in Siberian and Na-tive American Populations

Haplo-group

CR Sub-lineage

Polymorphic Nucleotides

1611 IT, 16192T, 16223T, 16290T,16319A, 16362C

1611 IT, 1 6223T, 16265G, 16290T,16319A, 16362C

16223T, 16290T, 16319A,16362C1611 IT, 16223T, 16290T, 16319A,16362C

16223T, 16298C, 16327T, 16519C16124C, 16223T, 16298C, 16327T,16519C

16093C, 16189C, 16223C, 16261T,16288C,16298C,16519C16223T, 16298C,16325C, 16327T,16519C

16223T, 16362C

16093C,16173T, 16223T, 16319A,16362C

16129A, 16223T, 16271T, 16362C16223T, 16325C,16362C16017C, 16093C,16129A,16223T,16519C

16126C, 16189C, 16231C, 16266T,16519C

16129A, 16185T, 16223T, 16224C,16260T, 16298C, 16519C

Note; The polymorphic nucleotides are reported as nucle-otide changes relative to the published reference sequence(Anderson etal. 1981).

I

IVI

II

IVI

II

IIIiV

I

I

12, 1 3). In both Chukotkan populations, the frequen-cies of haplogroup A haplotypes are found to beconsistent with those observed in the Yupik peoplefrom St. Lawrence Island and southern Alaska, andare similar to the frequency of this mtDNA lineage inNa-Dene Indians (Haida, Dogrib) and Amerindiansfrom the Northwest Coast of North America (Bella Coola,Nuu-Chah-Nulth). Conversely, the Aleut differ from theSiberian Yupik and Alaskan Alutiiq and Yup'ik in ex-hibiting haplogroup D mtDNAs at the highest frequency(Merriwether et al. 1 995; Rubicz et al. 2001, in press;Derbeneva et al. 2002). In addition, the Chukchi havehaplogroup C, G and Y mtDNAs (Derenko et al. 1 997,1998; Starikovskaya et al. 1998; Schurr et al. 2001),which are also present in the Koryak and Itelmen. Basedon what is known of Eskimo family histories, thelow frequency of haplogroup C mtDNAs in SiberianYupik could have been obtained through gene flowfrom the Chukchi. However, haplogroup C mtDNAs

are also observed in Alaskan Eskimo populations(Merriwether et al. 1 995), making it possible that thesehaplotypes were part of the genetic stock of ances-tral Eskimo, albeit present in low frequencies.

Kamchatkan Populations

Haplogroup A, C, and D encompass around forty-twopercent of Koryak mtDNAs but only twenty percentof Itelmen mtDNAs, with the remainder belonging tohaplogroups C, Y, and Z (Derenko et al. 1997; 1998;Schurr et al. 1999) aabie 12). Although the Koryakand Itelmen are more genetically similar to each otherthan to any other Siberian population, and share found-ing haplotypes from haplogroups C, C, Y, and Z, theyalso exhibit statistically significant differences inhaplogroup frequencies and haplotype distribution, im-plying some degree of genetic differentiation betweenthem (Schurr et al. 1999). The CR sequence data alsoreveal recent gene flow between the two Paleoasiatic-speaking populations (Schurr et al. 1999), confirmingprevious observations of population contact betweenthem (Antropova 1964a, 1964b; Krasheninnikov 1972;Arutiunov 1988a; Krushanov 1993). These results sup-port linguistic and culture evidence which indicatesthat Itelmen and Koryak populations arose from tem-porally distinct expansions into the Kamchatka Penin-sula (Vasil'evskii 1971; Arutiunov 1988a; Arutiunov andSergeev 1990; Dikov 1990).

In contrast, the Reindeer and Coastal Chukchigropus show much higher frequencies of haplogroupA, C, and D mtDNAs (Table 1 3; Torroni et al. 1 993b;Starikovskaya et al. 1998; Schurr 1998). Based onthese data, the three studied Chukchi populations re-semble each other more than any of them do to theKoryak or Itelmen. Furthermore, the intermediate fre-quencies of haplogroup A, C, and D mtDNAs in theReindeer Chukchi groups relative to the Koryak andthe Coastal Chukchi is consistent with the known his-torical expansion of Reindeer Chukchi south acrossthe Koryak Mountain Range, during which local Koryaktribes were at least partially absorbed (Bogoras 1904;

242

PEOPLES, ANIMALS, AND LAND/ GENETICS

Jochelson 1908), as well as docu-mented gene flow between the CoastChukchi and Siberian Yupik (Sukernikand Osipova 1982).

Mitochondrial DNA Variationin Eastern Siberian Popula-tions

Among other Native Siberian groups,mtDNAs belonging to haplogroup Care found primarily in eastern popula-tions, specifically the Even, Yukagir, andNganasan (Table 1 3). These results,along with the higher frequencies ofhaplogroup C mtDNAs in the Chukchi,Koryak, and Itelmen, imply a consid-erable degree of genetic contact be-tween eastern Siberian andPaleoasiatic-speaking groups fromKamchatka and Chukotka. This interpretation is sup-ported by ethnographic evidence of contact, trade,and conflict among eastern Siberian populationsCochelson 1 908, Antropova 1964a; Krushanov 1 993).By contrast, haplogroup Y mtDNAs are absent in mosteastern Siberian populations, but occurred at a highfrequency in the Nivkh and were present at polymor-phic frequencies in the Udegey, Nanay, Ulchi, Negidal,Korean, Ainu, and Japanese fTorroni et al. 1993b; Horaiet al. 1996; Schurr et al. 1 999, 2000).

The remaining "Other" mtDNAs in the Chukchi andeastern Siberian groups probably belong to haplogroupZ, with the highest frequency of these mtDNAs occur-ring in the Even and the Chukchi of the Pakhachi Rivergroup. This interpretation is supported by CR sequencedata from another Even population (Derenko et al.1997, 1998). Because these mtDNAs are also presentat low frequencies in the Nganasan and Yukagir, theycould have originated in Tungusic-speaking popula-tions and then spread to other ethnic groups throughcontact in the past several millennia. If correct, thisinterpretation would be supported by ethnographic

Table 12/ Haplogroup Frequencies in Eastern Pacific Rim Populations

POPULATION

n

A

B

C

D

C

Other

Ref

Frequency

(%)

Paleoasiatic:

Chukchi

66

68.2

—

10.6

12.1

.9.1

—

1

Eskimo-Aleut:

Siberian Yupik

79

77.2

—

2.5

20.3

—

—

1

Savoonga Yupik

49

93.9

—

—

2.0

—

4.1

2

Gambell Yupik

50

58.0

—

14.0

26.0

—

2.0

2

Old Harbor Alutiiq

11 5

61.7

3.5

—

34.8

—

—

2

Ouzinkie Alutiiq

41

73.2

—

4.9

14.6

—

7.3

2

Pribilof Is. Aleut

72

25.0

—

1.4

66.7

—

6.9

2

Na-Dene:

Dogrib

1 54

90.9

2.0

—

—

7.1

2

Haida

38

92.1

7.9

—

—

3

ndiud

o c

C. J

96.0

4.U

4

Amerindians:

Bella Coola

32

78.1

6.3

9.4

6.3

3

Bella Coola

25

60.0

8.0

8.0

20.0

4.0

4

Nuu-chah-nulth

63

44.4

3.2

19.0

22.2

1 1.1

5

Nuu-chah-nulth

15

40.0

6.7

13.3

26.7

13.3

4

Note.- 'Ref = References: / = Staril<ovsl<aya et al. (1998); 2 = Merriwetheret al. (1995); 3 = Ward et al. (1993); 4 = Torroni et al. (1993a); 5 = Ward etal. (1991). Other = Other haplotypes, i.e., those which do not belong to thehaplogroups identified in the table but may have different lineal affiliations

evidence indicating considerable assimilation of Yukagirpopulations by the Even (Arutiunov 1 988c), and cul-tural and genetic contacts between Even and Koryakalong the northern Sea of Okhotsk coast, due to theexpansion of the Even into that region during the sev-enteenth and eighteenth centuries Cochelson 1908;Antropova 1964a; Arutiunov 1988c).

In this regard, we now know that haplogroup Zoccurs in populations spanning the entire breadth ofnorthern Eurasia. It is observed as far west as the Saamiof Finland (Sajantila et al., 1995), also occurs amongthe Udmurt, Tatar, Bashkir, and Mari of the Volga-Uralicregion (Meinila et al., 2001; Bermisheva et al., 2002),and in seen in a number of eastern Siberian popula-tions (Table 1 3). Based on its distribution, haplogroupZ could possibly have accompanied the expansion ofNeolithic herding cultures throughout Eurasia.

Another trend seen in these data is that centralSiberian populations exhibit genetic profiles that arequite different from those of eastern Siberian groups.Although haplogroup A-D mtDNAs are present at vary-ing frequencies in the Mansi, Ket, Selkup, and Northern

T. C, SCHURR AND D. C. WALLACE

243

Table 13/ Haplogroup Distribution in West Pacific Rim and Siberian Populations

Population

n

B

D

H

J

M

0th Ref

CoastalChukchiReindeerChukchiAmguemaChukchiPakhachiChukchiKoryak*ReindeerKoryakMaritimeKoryakItelmenNivkhUdegeyNanayUlchiNegidalEven

Yukagir

Nganasan

EvenkTofalarTuvanBuryatNorthernAltaiKet

Selkup

KoreanTaiwaneseHan

66

70

24

46

1 5589

54

47574514371343

27

49

5127432428

23

20

1320

68.2

28.6

37.5

23.9

5.25.6

5.6

6.4

2.03.9

4.3

Haplogroup Frequencies {%)

7.7 7.7

10.6 12.1 —21.4 12.6 —

14.9

17.8

7.4 59.3

17.4

9.17.0

- — 1.4

25.7

16.7

8.3

_

16.7

2

10.9

10.9

2.2

30.4

2

1.3

41.3

_

_

9.7

_

5.8

_

3

1.1

_

43.8

_

_

7.9

10.1

3

1.9

37.0

14.8

3

68.1

4.3

6.4

3

28.1

5.3

64.9

1.8

2

8.9

73.3

2

42.9

7.1

14.3

21.4

10.8

10.8

37.8

1 3.5

23.1

1 5.4

7.7

1 5.4

7.7

7.0

2.3

32.6

2,

3

33.3

3.7

3.7

2,

3

36.7

4.1

2.0

2.0

12.2

2.0

2,

3

9.8

2.0

2

11.1

22.2

23.3

2.3

2.3

11.6

2.4

9.1

4.2

25.0

2.3

2.3

14.3

3.6

10.7

7.1

21.4

3.

5

34.8

4.3

17.4

60.9

3,

5

30.0

35.0

2.

3

23.1

1 5.4

23.1

7.7

15.4

6

5.0

10.0

45.0

6

Note.- n = sample size, and 0th = 'Other' haplotypes, i.e., those which do not belong to the haplogroups identified in thetable but may have different lineal affiliations. The asterisk C') indicates that 12 individuals were not certain of theirethnicity in terms of Maritime versus Reindeer Koryak, but included in the totals for all Koryaks. 'Ref = 'Reference': I= Starikovskaya et al. (1998); 2 = Torroni et al. (1993b); 3 = Schurr (1998); 4 = Schurr et al. (1999); 4 = Sukernik etal. (1996); 5 = Ballinger et al. (1992).

Altayan, the majority of their haplotypes belong toother mtDNA lineages (Torroni et al. 1993b; Sukerniket al. 1996; Derbeneva et al. 2002a; Schurr et al. 2003).These populations also largely lack mtDNAs belong-ing to haplogroups G, Y, and Z (Torroni et al. 1993b;Sukernik et al. 1996; Derbeneva et al. 2002a; Schurr etal. 2003). In fact, based on their RFLP composition,most of these haplotypes appear not to be of East

Asian origin (Table 1 3). Instead, all of the central Sibe-rian populations exhibit mtDNAs from West Eurasianhaplogroups H and U (Schurr 1998; Derbeneva et al.2002a; Schurr et al. 2003), with the remaining haplo-types belonging to other West Eurasian haplo-groups.These results clearly indicate that western/centralSiberian populations are distinctive from easternSiberian populations, and appear to have mtDNAs of

244

PEOPLES, ANIMALS, AND LAND/ GENETICS

Hapio- Geographicgroup Region

BC

D

CYZ

Siberia

America

America

Siberia

America

Siberia

America

Siberia

Siberia

Siberia

botli ancient Eurasian andAsian origin as part of theiroverall genetic composition.

When these differences inhaplogroup compositionamong Native Siberian popu-lations were statistically ana-lyzed, several distinct popula-tion groupings reflecting theregional differences amongstthem were observed (Fig. 76).These included branches lead-ing to Chukotkan groups, Kam-chatkan groups, Uralic-Tungusic groups, and centralSiberian groups. The closeness of the Yukagir toTungusic-speaking groups probably reflected the re-cent assimilation of the former populations by theEven (Arutiunov 1988c), with the Nganasan showingintermediate position between the Uralic-Tungusic andcentral Siberian clusters due to having haplotypes incommon with each set of populations. Interestingly,the Nivkh were positioned away from the rest of theeastern Siberians, and clustered with the Koreans, whoalso had haplogroup D, C, and Y haplotypes (Ballingeret al. 1992; Horai et al. 1996). Similarly, the Udegeywere something of an outlier relative to other Siberianpopulations, and clustered with the Taiwanese Han,who also had significant frequencies of "other" mtDNAswith similar mutational characteristics as those presentin the Udegey, although not belonging to the sameexact haplogroups, since most of those present in theUdegey belong to haplogroup M (Torroni et al. 1993b).

Genetic Discontinuity of Paleoasiatic-speakersand Native Americans

Given the overall pattern of genetic divergence in Si-beria, it was not surprising that a comparison of thehaplotypic diversity of Paleoasiatic-speaking and Na-tive American groups revealed a striking discontinuitybetween these populations.

Table 14/ Sequence Divergence of Siberian and Native American Haplogroups

n N Sequence Divergence Divergence {%) Time (YBP)

10 119 0.0280 12,714 - 9,645

46 189 0.0789 35,550 - 26,969

30 99 0.0391 1 5,205 - 1 1,53414 123 0.0433 19,686 -14,934

31 72 0.1223 54,009 - 40,97213 47 0.1115 50,664 - 38,43416 62 0.0565 25,682 -19,4831 1 106 0.0239 10,855 - 8,2347 58 0.0138 6,864 - 5,2074 12 0.0209 9,495 - 7,203

Note.' n = number of haplotypes, and N = number of individual mtDNAs, for eachhaplogroup. The sequence divergence estimates were weighted by the number of indi-viduals within each haplogroup. Divergence times were calculated by multiplying thehaplogroup sequence divergences by the mtDNA evolutionary rate of 2.2-2.9% perMYR (Torroni et al. 1994a).

Haplogroup Distribution

Although having a number of haplogroup A, C, and Dhaplotypes, the Chukchi, Koryak, and Itelmen, as wellas the Siberian Yupik, are not closely genetically re-lated to Native American populations. In fact, theyactually share only the founding haplotypes fromhaplogroups A and C with Amerindian groups, and,based on CR sequence data, these do not appear tobe identical to comparable mtDNAs from Native Ameri-can populations. Otherwise, Paleoasiatic-speaking andNorth Pacific Rim groups exhibit a number of popula-tion- or region-specific haplotypes in each of thesehaplogroups, which apparently arose in their ancestralpopulations independent of those occurring in Paleo-indian groups (Ward et al. 1991, 1993; Torroni et al.1992, 1993b; Shields et al. 1993; Starikovskaya et al.1998; Schurr et al. 1999). Therefore, the majority ofthese mtDNAs cannot be the same as the foundinghaplotype in New World populations, and instead, musthave arisen after the colonization of the New World.

This degree of genetic differentiation of Siberianand Native American populations provides evidencefor at least two major expansions of ancient Beringianpopulations into northern North America before andafter the last major period of glaciation, the timing ofwhich are mirrored by the different divergence values

T. C. SCHURR AND D. C. WALLACE

245

for haplogroup A in Siberia and the Americas (Table14). The estimated sequence divergence for this haplo-group in Siberia is 0.028 percent, a value considerablyless than that for the Americas, 0.079 percent. Thesevalues give correspondingly different divergence timesfor Siberia (1 3,000-1 0,000 years before present (YBP))and the Americas (36,000-27,000 YBP). This apparentdiscrepancy is largely attributable to almost exclusivelyChukotkan haplotypes being present in the haplogroupA estimate for Native Siberians. In fact, the three esti-mates of the genetic divergence of haplogroup A inSiberian and Native American populations, one forChukotkan groups (0.029 percent; 12,727-9,655 YBP),Na-Dene Indians (0.021 percent; 9,545-7,241 YBP), andAmerindians (0.079percent; 35,909-27,241 YBP) (Tor-roni et al. 1992; Starikovskaya et al. 1 998; Schurr et al.1999), show very clearly the extent of diversity whichhas developed between them, not just within the haplo-group itself. Thus, while these divergence estimatesdo not give exact times for the ages of specific ethnicgroups, they provide a temporal framework in whichto view the emergence of the ancestral populationsfor the three major Native American linguistic divisions.

In addition, haplogroup B mtDNAs are absent inthe Koryak and Itelmen, as well as in the Chukchi andSiberian Yupik (Torroni et al. 1993b; Starikovskaya etal. 1 998; Schurr et al. 1 999). In fact, haplogroup B isabsent in almost all eastern Siberian populations (Shieldset al. 1992; Petrishchev et al. 1993; Torroni et al.1993b), excepting those inhabiting the southernmargin of Siberia adjacent to Mongolia and northernChina, where low frequencies of deletion haplotypesappear (Petrishchev et al. 1993; Kolman et al. 1996;Sukernik et al. 1996). Conversely, this mtDNA lineageis present in almost all Amerindian populations at lowto moderate frequencies (Schurr et al. 1990; Ward etal. 1991, 1993; Torroni et al. 1992, 1993a, 1994a;Merriwetheretal. 1995; Lorenz and Smith 1994). Theseresults suggest that haplogroup B was never part ofthe ancestral gene pool for Paleoasiatic-speaking popu-lations, and that these groups played no role in the

dispersal of this mtDNA lineage into the New World.Furthermore, the virtual absence of haplogroup BmtDNAs in modern Eskimo, Aleut, and northern Na-Dene Indian populations (Table 11), which representmore recent expansions into North America, impliesthat haplogroup B mtDNAs were not present in theBeringian region after 10,000 YBP, when these popula-tions were likely founded.

Regarding the other mtDNA lineages present innortheastern Siberians, haplogroup C, Y, and Z mtDNAshave not been observed in either ancient or modernNative American groups (Schurr et al. 1990; Torroni etal. 1992, 1993a, 1994a, b; Stone and Stoneking 1998;Lorenz and Smith 1996, 1 997). Therefore, populationsbearing these haplotypes must have spread in north-east Asia after the initial populating of the New World.Consistent with this hypothesis, the divergence timesof haplogroups G, Y, and Z are shallower than those ofhaplogroups A-D in Siberia and the Americas (Table1 3). Of these Siberian mtDNA lineages, haplogroup Gis the oldest and most diverse, a result paralleled by itsbroader distribution within Asia itself (Horai et al. 1996;Ballinger et al. 1992; Torroni et al. 1 993b; Schurr 1998;Starikovskaya et al. 1998; Schurr et al. 1999, 2001;Bermisheva et al. 2001; Derbeneva et al. 2002a).

CR Sublineage Distribution

The distribution of CR sublineages in Siberian andNative Americans further highlights the genetic discon-tinuities between these populations. To begin with,the primary sublineages within haplogroups A, C, andD present in northeastern Siberians differ from those inNative Americans (Table 1 5). In general, Paleoasiatic-speakers and North Pacific Rim populations share moreof these sublineages than either did with eastern Sibe-rian or Native American populations. Within haplogroupA, almost every CR sequence from these populationshas the 1611 IT mutation that delineates "American"from "Asian" haplotypes from this mtDNA lineage. Sincethe founding CR sequence for this haplogroup is theonly mtDNA shared between the Chukchi, Siberian

246

PEOPLES, ANIMALS, AND LAND/ GENETICS

Table 15/ Distribution ofhaplogroup A, C and D Sublimages in Sibe-rian and Native American Populations

Haplo-

CR Sequence

Eastern

raieo-

N. Pacific Rim Amerindians

group

Sublineage

Siberians

Asiatics

Populations

A

1

VA

X

II

X

III

111

VA

YA

l\ /

IV

A;

YA

r

1

X

II

X

111

X

IV

X

D

1

X

II

X

X

111

X

IV

X

Note; 'Eastern Siberians' include Nivkh, Udegey, and Evenk; Paleoasiatics'include Itelmen, Koryak, and Chukchi; 'North Pacific Rim Populations' includeSiberian and Alaskan Yupik, Alaskan Inuit, and Na-Dene Indians; and 'Amerindians'include NW Coast and all other Amerindian populations

Yupik, Alaskan Alutiiq and Yup'ik, Na-Dene Indians, andAmerindians (Ward et al. 1991, 1993; Shields et al.1993; Starikovskaya et al. 1998), it clearly demarcatesthe occurrence of the 16111T mutation in haplogroupA mtDNAs, hence, the initial population expansion whichbrought them to the New World.

Several other polymorphic nucleotides identify/ spe-cific sublineages of haplogroup A. The 16192T muta-tion distinguishes a set of mtDNAs that are found onlyin the Koryak, Chukchi, Siberian Yupik, Alaskan Alutiiqand Yup'ik, Aleut, and Na-Dene Indians (Table 14), and,hence, delineates a "North Pacific Rim" branch of thishaplogroup. These sublineage I mtDNAs comprise sixtypercent of the Chukchi and Siberian Yupik mtDNAs(Starikovskaya et al. 1998), as well as the majority ofCR sequences in Alaskan Athapaskans, Alaskan Alutiiqand Yup'ik (Shields et al. 1993) and Aleut (Rubicz et al.2001, In Press). Such a distribution implies that thesehaplogroup A mtDNAs evolved in isolation from simi-lar haplotypes in the Na-Dene Indians and Amerindiansliving in the NW Coast, and that they are part of thecommon genetic stock that gave rise to the Chukchi,Eskimo-Aleut, and Alaskan Athapaskans.

Within sublineage I, a Na-Dene-specific sub-branchis also present. This sub-branch is characterized by

the np 16233Cand np 16331Ctran-sitions, the latter also causing theRsal np 16329 site loss which hasbeen observ/ed in Na-Dene-specificRFLP haplotypes (Torroni et al. 1992,1993a). Haplotypes with this mu-tation occur in the Dogrib and Tlingitof Canada, and are also present inthe Navajo and Apache of the UnitedStates Southwest (Torroni et al.1992, 1993), populations that de-scended from Northern Atha-paskans (Haskell 1987). Based onthese data, it appears that this sub-branch of sublineage I arose early inthe differentiation of Athapaskanpopulations prior to their dispersal into Alaska andNorth America, and was spread to neighboringAmerindian populations through gene flow.

In addition, all of the CR lineages having the16265C transition form a distinct cluster that containexclusively Eskimoan sequences (Table 14). In fact,every Eskimo population analyzed for CR sequencevariation exhibits mtDNAs from sublineage II (Shieldset al. 1993; Starikovskaya et al. 1998; Saillard et al.2000). As a consequence, these mtDNAs appear tohave arisen in ancestral Eskimoan populations, andspread to various circum-arctic regions during the ex-pansion of the ancestors of today's Yupik and Inuitpeople during the last several thousand years. In con-trast, the third sublineage (III) lacks the 161 1 ITmutation altogether. These CR sequences appearlargely in East Asian and eastern Siberian populations.Because they lack the 1611 IT mutation, sublineage 111mtDNAs likely represent the ancestral state for thismtDNA lineage (Table 11). Among Paleoasiatic-speak-ers, the Koryak and Itelmen have haplogroup A CRsequences from sublineages I and III, whereas theChukchi and Siberian Yupik lack them altogether.

Recent studies of Aleut populations also indicatethat they have unique haplogroup A sequences (Rubicz

T. C. SCHURR AND D. C. WALLACE

247

Amguyema Chukchi

Coast Chukchi Siberian Eskimo

L Pakhachi Chukchi

Udegey

Taiwanese Han

Nivkh

Korean

N. Altaian

Ket

'Sel'kup

Nganasan

Yukagir

Evenk

Even

Maritime Koryak

Reindeer Koryak Itel'men

76/Neighbor-Joining Tree for Aboriginal Siberian and East Asian Populations

The genetic distances used to generate this tree were estimated from RFLPhaplotype data (modified after Schurr et al. 1999, Fig. 5).

et al. 2001, In Press). The majority of these sequencesderive from sublineage I, with two distinct subsets alsohaving the 16212A—C (16212C) and 16234C—T(16234T) transitions, both of which appear to be Aleut-specific. However, none of the Aleut sequences havethe Eskimo-specific 16265C transition (Shields et al.1993; Starikovskaya et al. 1998; Saillard et al. 2000),or the Athapaskan-specific 16331G transition (Shieldset al. 1993; Torroni et al. 1 993a).

mtDNAs belonging to a fourth sublineage (IV) ofhaplogroup A occur exclusively in Native Americanpopulations (Table 1 5). Within this sublineage, the16129A mutation defines a largely North Amerindiancluster of haplogroup A mtDNAs which is comprised

of Haida, Nuu-Chah-Nulth, and BellaCoola CR sequences, and, within thiscluster, a subgroup consisting of onlyNuu-Chah-Nulth mtDNAs is seen(Shields et al 1993; Starikovskaya etal. 1998). Another cluster definedby the 16355T transition containedonly Haida and Bella Coola mtDNAs(Ward et al. 1991, 1993;Starikovskaya et al. 1998). Theuniqueness of these Haidahaplogroup A CR sequences, andthe lack of mtDNAs having the Na-Dene-specific 16331G transition,explains in large part the geneticdifferences previously observedbetween the Haida and other Na-Dene Indian populations (Torroni etal. 1992, 1993b; Shields etal. 1993).Overall, these population-specific CRsublineages may reflect the isola-tion and re-emergence of remnantpopulations occupying biogeo-graphic refugia in Beringiaand south-ern Alaska, which existed until theend of the last glacial maximum(Rogers et al. 1991). Moreover,these findings imply that Amerindian populationshave become genetically differentiated from groupsresiding in Arctic and Subarctic regions, and that con-siderable gene flow has taken place among NW Coastpopulations.

Similar trends were observed for the CR sequencesof haplogroups C and D. Two sublineages in haplogroupC bear a close resemblance to haplogroup C mtDNAspresent in Native American populations (sublineageIV) by having the 16223T-16298C-16327T sequencemotif characteristic of this mtDNA lineage (Tables11, 15). Sub-lineage I occurs predominantly in EastAsian and eastern Siberian populations, whereas theother (II), having the additional 16124Cand 16318T

248

PEOPLES, ANIMALS, AND LAND/ GENETICS

mutations, occurs only in Paleoasiatic groups (II).Amerindian sub-lineage IV differs from these Siberiansublineages by the presence of the 16325C mutation.The only populations found to have similar mtDNAsare Mongolians and Amur River populations (Kolmanet al. 1996; Schurr et al. 2001), suggesting these re-gions as possible source areas for ancestral NativeAmericans. By contrast, the third Siberian sublineage(III) has a quite different sequence motif than the oth-ers, and appears only in Paleoasiatic groups, possiblyreflecting its origins amongst them.

Likewise, haplogroup D has several sublineageswithin it (Table 14). The first (I) occurs at very lowfrequencies among Paleoasiatic-speaking groups andSiberian Yupik, and represented the onlyhaplogroup D mtDNA in the Koryak (SIB40;Starikovskaya et al. 1998). The secondsublineage (II) occurs exclusively amongChukotkan populations, as no similar typesare seen among Native American groupswith high frequencies of haplogroup D (Wardet al. 1991, 1993; Shields et al. 1993). Theremaining mtDNAs from East Asian andeastern Siberian populations formed asublineage (III) that had a sequence motifmost similar to haplogroup D haplotypesin Native American populations (sub-lineageIV), indicating that sublineage III probablyrepresents the ancestral state for thismtDNA lineage in Asia and the Americas.Amerindian sublineage IV mtDNAs weredistinguished from similar Asian haplo-types by the 16325C mutation. Interest-ingly, the only Asian populations that werefound to possess haplogroup D mtDNAswith the 1632 5C mutation are Japanese andKoreans (Horai et al. 1996) and Amur Rivergroups (Schurr et al. 2001). These findingssuggest that East Asia could be a possiblesource area for these haplotypes in NewWorld populations.

Aleut populations also have unique haplogroup Dsequences (Rubicz et al. 2001, In Press; Derbeneva etal. 2002b). These sequences have the 16129A and16271C transitions defining the D2 subtype describedby Forster et al. (1996), which is defined by the16223T-16271C-16362C motif. The D2 subtype haspreviously been detected in the Chukchi and SiberianEskimo (Starikovskaya et al. 1998), as well as a singleAlaskan Athapaskan Indian (Shields et al. 1993), but isabsent from Greenland Eskimos and Kamchatkan popu-lations (Saillard et al. 2000, Schurr et al. 1999). Thispattern suggests that D2 haplotypes arose in ances-tral Aleut and were disseminated to surrounding groupsthrough gene flow.

Koryaks

Itel'men

Ainu

Japanese

Koreans

Siberians

Yakima

Nuu-Chah-Nulth

Bella Coola

Haida

Eskimos

Chukchi

///Neighbor-joining tree for aboriginal Siberian, East Asian, andAmerindian populations. The genetic distances used to generate thistree were estimated from CR sequence data (Schurr et al. 1999, Fig. 8).

T. C. SCHURR AND D. C. WALLACE

249

The phylogenetic analysis of CR sequence variationin eastern Siberian, East Asian, and Native Americanpopulations revealed sets of relationships which wereconsistent with this assessment (Fig. 77). First, therewas an obvious split between the Paleoasiatic-speakinggroups from Chukotka and Kamchatka. The Koryakand Itelmen showed much closer genetic ties to the Ainuand East Asian populations, whereas the Chukchi weremuch closer to the Siberian Yupik, Haida, and North-west Coast Amerindian populations. In addition, thecontemporary Korean and Japanese populationsshowed close genetic affinities, and the Ainu had ge-netic similarities to both groups, as seen in Horai et al.(1996). The latter association was probably attrib-utable to recent admixture between the Ainu and Japa-nese, rather than these groups having an ancient sharedancestry.

Certain affinities among Native American popula-tions were also evident in this analysis. All NorthwestCoast Amerindian populations clustered together, andthe Bella Coola and the Haida showed a particularlyclose relationship. This close relationship seemed toimply that the Haida were an Amerindian populationthat was linguistically influenced by Na-Dene Indians,rather than being a Na-Dene Indian group that was ge-netically influenced by Amerindians. However, furthercomparisons of genetic diversity in the Haida, AlaskanAthapaskans, and Northwest Coast Amerindian groupswill be necessary to confirm this hypothesis.

Furthermore, eastern Siberians and the Yakima ofWashington state show some degree of similarity toeach other. This similarity largely results from the factthat eastern Siberians contained a number of differenthaplotypes from haplogroups A, C, and D, and thesehad CR sequences that were more similar to those inAmerindian populations than those in Chukotkan andKamchatkan populations. As a result, eastern Siberi-ans and Amerindian populations were positioned fairlyclose to each other (Fig. 77). In other words, popula-tions located some distance away from the North Pa-cific Rim on either side of Bering Strait tended to have

more similar CR sequences than those occupying theformer Beringian region. However, it should be notedthat all of the Siberian haplotypes differed from com-parable Native American haplotypes at the RFLP level.Hence, both eastern Siberians and Amerindians appearto have arisen from common ancestral populations,rather than from those that expanded in this regionmore recently, such as Paleoasiatic groups, Eskimo-Aleut, and Na-Dene Indians. Concomitantly, thosepopulations whose ancestors last occupied the formerBeringian region have become genetically differenti-ated from Siberian and Amerindian groups, and nowresemble each other more closely than to their puta-tive sister groups in northern Asia and the New World.

When additional CR sequences from other NativeSiberian populations are used to assess the geneticaffinities of these populations, some of these samepatterns are observed (Fig. 78). Paleoasiatic popula-tions are split into Chukotkan and Kamchatkan groups,while the Reindeer Koryak show similarities to the Even,who probably influenced them culturally and geneti-cally. The Koryak and Itelmen also show similarities toAmur River groups, who have significant frequenciesof haplogroup G and Y mtDNAs, and this may reflectthe common origins of these populations. While form-ing a distinct branch separate from the easternmostpopulations, the Tofalar, Evenk, Buryat and Tuvan clus-tered together within a larger grouping that includedall eastern Siberian peoples. By contrast, the Yakut,Northern Altayan, Ket, and Selkup clustered at somedistance from eastern Siberian populations, most likelybecause of the sizeable portion of Western Eurasianhaplotypes in their mtDNA gene pool (Table 10).

Comparison of Genetic and Anthropomet-ric Data for North Pacific Rim Populations

The results of these studies allowed a direct compari-son of the patterns of biological variation among NorthPacific Rim populations based on mtDNA, nuclear DNA,anthropometric, and craniometric data. The first no-table difference between these sets of analyses was

250

PEOPLES, ANIMALS, AND LAND/ GENETICS

the relationship between the Koryak andItelmen. Based on mtDNA data, these twopopulations show close genetic affinities(Schurr et al. 1999), while the principalcomponents (PC) analysis of JNPE anthro-pometric data shows the Kamchadal(Itelmen) to be distantly related to othereastern Siberian groups, including theKoryak (Comuzzie et al. 1995). In all like-lihood, this discrepancy reflects the sig-nificant level of admixture betweenItelmen and Russians since the turn of theeighteenth century (Antropova 1964b;Murashko 1994), and mostly that medi-ated through non-Native male gene flow,since the mtDNA data clearly show theItelmen to have only aboriginal genotypesamongst them.

There were also shifting patterns ofassociation amongst the Paleoasiatic-speaking populations of Chukotka andKamchatka. Aside from the Koryak-ltelmencloseness, the mtDNA data show theKoryak to have some affinities with Chuk-chi populations, but stronger links withpopulations from the Lower Amur River/Sea of Okhotsk region farther south (Nivkh,Udegey, Nanay, Ulchi, Negidal, Ainu). ThePC analysis of JNPE anthropometric data also revealaffinities between the Koryak and the Even and Yukagir(Comuzzie et al. 1995; Ousley 1995), associations thatare reflected in the genetic distance estimates basedon mtDNA haplogroup and frequencies and CR se-quence variation in Siberian groups (Figs. 76 and 78).

Third, the relationship of the Nivkh to other easternSiberian and circumpolar Arctic populations differsdepending on the type of analysis being conducted.mtDNA studies indicate that the Nivkh are an outlierrelative to most eastern Siberian groups, but do havelinks to both Lower Amur River, Sea of Okhotsk, andKamchatkan populations. By contrast, the PC analysis

Yakuts

Sel'kupsKets

Northern Altaians

— Udegeys

Negldals

Nivkhs

Ulchi

Nanai

Itei'men

Koryaks

Reindeer Koryaks

Evens

Tofalars

SEskimos

Chukchi

Venisey Evenks

BuryatsTuvans

78/ Neighbor-Joining tree for Native Siberian and East Asian Populations.

The genetic distances used to generate this tree were based on CR sequencedata from these populations (Shields et al. 1993; Derenko et al. 1997,1998; Starikov-skaya et al. 1998; Schurr et al. 1999, 2000,2001, 2003)

of JNPE anthropometric data position the Nivkh closeto both the Chukchi and Aleut (Comuzzie et al. 1995),or to the Alaskan Athapaskans (Ousley 1995). Al-though having a high frequency of haplogroup D, noneof these Nivkh haplotypes are closely related to thoseappearing in Paleoasiatic-speaking populations. Thesedifferences may, thus, reflect the convergence of physi-cal features in the Nivkh and other North Pacific popu-lations, rather than being the consequence of substan-tial contact and gene flow amongst them.

Fourth, the clustering of Eskimo populations variesaccording to the type of data being used in the analy-sis. One PC analysis of JNPE anthropometric data (Ousley

T. C. SCHURR AND D. C. WALLACE

1995) suggested a link between the Labrador,MacKenzie Delta, and Siberian Yupik, and affinitiesbetween the other Alaskan Yup'ik with Aleut andAmerindians, whereas another showed the SiberianYupik to be intermediate between the Koryak andChukchi (Comuzzie et al. 1995). Nuclear genetic datareveal a different pattern, with most Eskimo popula-tions clustering together, and the Aleut divergingfrom Eskimo groups (Harper 1980; Crawford et al.1981). The mtDNA data also highlight the geneticsimilarity among Eskimo populations, both Siberian andAlaskan, and the relative closeness of Eskimo groupsand Alaskan Athapaskans, as well as the strong tiesbetween Siberian Yupik and Chukchi (Starikovskaya etal. 1998). These differences imply that regional inter-actions with eastern Siberian, Aleut, or Athapaskanpopulations may have influenced the distribution ofphysical features in Eskimo groups.

Fifth, the Aleut also show varying degrees of simi-larity to North Pacific Rim populations, depending onthe type of data being analyzed. Based on limitedmtDNA data for this population, the Aleut appear tobe part of the genetic stock which emerged after theinitial peopling of the New World, although exhibitinghaplogroup A and D frequencies which distinguishedthem from other Eskimoan populations. On the otherhand, PC analysis of JNPE anthropometric data has iden-tified affinities between the Aleut and Alaskan Yup'ik(Ousley 1995), or between them and Athapaskans andNorthwest Coast Amerindians (Comuzzie et al. 1995).Therefore, the Aleut appear to have biological charac-teristics that are intermediate between those of a num-ber of populations from the North Pacific Rim, perhapsas a consequence of their geographic isolation andlater contact with various ethnic groups.

Finally, unlike the Aleut, the Haida show ratherconsistent patterns of similarity to North Pacific Rimpopulations, irrespective of the type of data beinganalyzed. The mtDNA data reveal the Haida to haveaffinities with both Athapaskan and NW Coast Amer-indian populations, although tending to be closer to

the latter groups. The same pattern is observed in thePC analysis of JNPE anthropometric data (Ousley 1 995)and previous nuclear genetic data (Field et al. 1988), aswell as linguistic evidence for this group (Krauss 1 988).Thus, to a degree not seen for other Arctic populations,all biological anthropological data for the Haida are gen-erally concordant in revealing mixed Athapaskan-Amerindian genetic and cultural influences on the for-mation of this tribal group, as well as certain uniquefeatures that may have arisen as a consequence of itsgeographic isolation.

Overall, these analyses confirm that single locusgenetic systems such as the mtDNA are informativefor delineating the origins and affinities of human popu-lations, in this case, Paleoasiatic-speaking and othereastern Siberian groups. In addition, they have shownthat certain populations cluster together on the basisof shared maternally-inherited genetic lineages and theirconstituent haplotypes, probably due to their com-mon origins and subsequent regional differentiation.These studies have further demonstrated how thegenetic substructure within these groups can beused to piece together the population history of north-east Siberia and northern North America. However,the uncertain relationships among some North PacificRim populations revealed by the comparison of mtDNAdata with those from anthropometric, craniometric,and nuclear genetic studies indicate that data from bi-parentally inherited genetic systems, as well as theuniparentally inherited Y-chromosome, are needed tomore fully characterize the process of populationdifferentiation in these regions, and hence, test previ-ous hypothesizes about the genetic prehistory of ab-original Siberian groups.

Revisiting JNPE Conclusions About North-eastern Siberian Origins

Based on these molecular data, it is possible to makea number of conclusions about the associations be-tween eastern Siberian and Native American popula-tions, and to determine how well these findings relate

2 52

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to the models proposed by Boas and his colleagues atthe turn of the century. First, from a genetic standpoint,Paleoasiatic-speakers do not appear to be closely re-lated to Native American populations. Although havinghaplogroups A, C, and D in common, Paleoasiatic-speak-ing and Amerindian populations share few, if any,haplotypes from these mtDNA lineages. Such differ-ences probably reflect the fact that the former popula-tions expanded into northeastern Siberia following thelast glacial maximum, whereas ancestral Amerindianshad entered the New World well before this time. Thus,from a molecular perspective, Paleoasiatic-speakerscannot be considered "Americanoids."

Second, the genetic data reveal a dichotomy be-tween Paleoasiatic-speakers from Chukotka and thosefrom Kamchatka. Based on mtDNA data, the Chukchiand Siberian Yupik have strong genetic ties with popu-lations located across the Bering Strait from them, suchas Alaskan Eskimo and Na-Dene Indians, as well asaffinities with some northern Amerindian groups. Bycontrast, the Koryak and Itelmen have stronger ge-netic connections with ethnic groups originating in theLower Amur River/Sea of Okhotsk region, such as theNivkh, Udegey, Nanay, Ulchi, Negidal, and Ainu. Theseassociations suggest that Kamchatkan and Lower AmurRiver populations emerged from a common gene poolsome 5000-8000 years ago, or perhaps that theemerging northern Okhotsk cultures that gave rise tothe Koryak and Itelmen subsequently influenced thoseevolving from southern Okhotsk cultures.

Along the same lines, the molecular data do notreveal the presence of an "Eskimo wedge" among north-eastern Siberians and Native American groups (see alsoDumond, this volume). In general, Eskimo groups havemtDNA haplotypes that are similar to those appearingin Na-Dene Indians and Chukchi, and hence, appear tohave emerged from the last inhabitants of ancientBeringia before the flooding of the land bridge. ThemtDNA data may also suggest that Eskimo popula-tions evolved in the Bering Sea region, perhaps insouthwest Alaska, rather than north-central Canada,

as suggested by the "Eskimo wedge" model. On theother hand, the Chukchi, Eskimo, Aleut, and Na-DeneIndians all tend to be genetically distinctive from eachother, implying some degree of geographic isolationamongst them since the occupation of their respec-tive homelands.

Fourth, the molecular data show both the ge-netic distinctiveness of Tungusic-speaking groups,and their genetic influence on the Yukagir, Chukchi,and Koryak. These findings are consistent with bothethnographic evidence from northeastern Siberiangroups, and the analyses of the anthropometric datacollected in this region during the JNPE. In addition,central Siberian groups, such as the Northern Altayan,Selkup, and Ket, are not closely linked to eastern Sibe-rian populations, and instead show a distinct geneticprofile that includes both West Eurasian and East Asiangenotypes. These regional differences support previ-ous assertions by Boas and members of the JNPE thatnortheastern Siberian populations had origins andaffinities distinct from those groups located in theinterior of northern Asia, such as the Mongolian, Buryat,Tungusic-speakers, and Yakut (Sakha), the later twosets of populations having entered this region in rela-tively recent prehistory.

Finally, the mtDNA data have provided a number ofinsights into the process of the peopling of the World.To begin with, they suggest a pre-glacial maximumdate (> 18,000 cal BP) for the emergence and expan-sion of ancestral Paleoindians into the New World (Table13), as also proposed by Boas (1905). They also sug-gest the occurrence of multiple population movementsacross the Bering Strait during this early period of settle-ment (between 35,000-15,000 cal BP), possibly usingboth interior and coastal routes (Torroni et al. 1993a,b; Starikovskaya et al. 1998; Schurr et al. 1999; Schurrand Wallace 1999). Furthermore, as noted above, thesedata are generally consistent with the glacial barriermodel of Rogers et al. (1991). According to this model,once ancestral Amerindian populations began settlingin the New World, glacial coalescence cut them off

T. C. SCHURR AND D. C. WALLACE

253

from related groups living farther north on the Beringianland mass. The resulting ice barriers in Beringia andNorth American isolated in glacial refugia the popula-tions that would eventually develop into the Eskimo-Aleut, Na-Dene Indians, and Amerindian populations.Similar refugia were created within eastern Siberia, withthe concomitant population isolation leading to the lin-guistic and biological differentiation of the ancestralgroups that gave rise to Chukotko-Kamchatkan-,Yukagir-, Altaic-, and Uralic-speaking, populations. Ona larger scale, these glacial refugia may also have per-mitted the divergence of "caucasoid" and "mongol-oid" populations, thereby influencing the pattern ofgenetic variation throughout all of Eurasia.

Acknowledgments

The authors thank Drs. Rem I. Sukernik and Elena B.Starikovskaya for their participation in a larger studyof Siberian and Native American origins, from whichthis paper is contributed. Thanks also to Lorri Griffinand the Clinical Research Center of the Emory Univer-sity School of Medicine for their assistance in the pro-cessing of blood samples, and Drs. Andy Kogelnik andSandro Bonatto for their assistance with the statisticalanalysis of the mtDNA data. Many thanks are also dueto the hospital staff and doctors in the villages ofOssora, Karaga, Tymlat, Voyampolka, and Kovran inKamchatka, Russia for their assistance with this project;the Koryak and Itelmen people from these villages fortheir participation in this research and hospitality dur-ing our fieldwork in Kamchatka in 1993 and 1996; Dr.Vladimir V. Slavinskiy of the Providenya hospital for hisgenerous help and assistance with sample collectionin the Chukchi Autonomous Area; and the Chukchi andSiberian Yupik people for their participation in this re-search during fieldwork in Chukotka in 1994. This re-search was supported by the International ScienceFoundation, the J. Worley Brown Fellowship Fund, theLeakey Foundation, the National Institutes of Health,the National Science Foundation, the Russian Fund forBasic Research, Sigma Xi, and The Wenner-Gren Foun-dation for Anthropological Research.

Notes

1. A "haplotype" is an individual mtDNA de-fined by a specific set of polymorphisms, whereasa "haplotype group," or "haplogroup" is a set ofrelated haplotypes that share the same set of iden-tifying mutations. The term "mtDNA lineage" isused interchangeably with "haplogroup" in thetext, since both denote the same genealogicalassociations among mtDNAs.

2. For a description of the methods used tocharacterize mtDNA variation in Siberian and Na-tive American populations, please refer to thepublications cited in the text and tables.

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phism). Cenetika 32(3):432-39.Torroni, Antonio, James V. Neel, RamiroBarrantes, Theodore C. Schurr, and Douglas C.Wallace

1 994a A Mitochondrial DNA 'Clock' for the Amer-inds and Its Implications for Timing Their Entry intoNorth America. Proceedings of the National Academyof Sciences 9](3y.]] 58-62.

Torroni, A., K. Huoponen, P. Francalacci, M.

Petrozzi, L. Morelli, R. Scozzari, D. Obinu, Marja-

Liisa Savontaus, and D.C. Wallace.

1 996 Classification of European mtDNAs from anAnalysis of three European Populations. Genetics144(4): 1835-50.

Torroni, Antonio, Marie T. Lott, Margaret F.

Cabell, Yu-Sheng Chen, Leo Lavergne, and

Douglas C. Wallace

1 994c mtDNA and the Origin of Caucasians: Identi-fication of Ancient Caucasian-specific Haplogroups,One of Which is Prone to a Recurrent Somatic Dupli-cation in the D-loop Region. American Journal of Hu-man Genetics 55(4y.760-76.

Torroni, A., R. I. Sukernik, T. C. Schurr, Y. B.

Starikovskaya, M. A. Cabell, M. H. Crawford, A.

C. Comuzzie, and D. C. Wallace

1993b mtDNA Variation of Aboriginal Siberians Re-veals Distinct Genetic Affinities with Native Ameri-cans. American Journal of Human Genetics 5 3(3): 591 -608.

Torroni, A., T. C. Schurr, Chi-Chuan Yang, E.Szathmary, R. C. Williams, M. S. Schanfield, G. A.Troup, W. C. Knowler, D. N. Lawrence, K. M.Weiss, and D. C. Wallace

1 992 Native American Mitochondrial DNA AnalysisIndicates that the Amerind and the Na-Dene Popula-tions were Founded by Two Independent Migra-tions. Genetics 1 30(1):1 53-62.

Torroni, A., T. G. Schurr, M. F. Cabell, M. D.

Brown, J. V. Neel, M. Larsen, D. G. Smith, C. M.

Vullo, and D. C. Wallace

1993a Asian Affinities and Continental Radiation ofthe Four Founding Native American MitochondrialDNAs. American Journal of Human Genetics 53(3):563-90.

Vasil'evskii, Ruslan S.

1971 Proiskhozhdenie i dreviaia kul'tura koriakov(JheOrigins and Ancient Culture of the Koryak).Novosibirsk: Nauka Publishers.

Ward, R. H., A. Redd, D. Valencia, B. Frazier, and

S. Paabo

1993 Genetic and Linguistic Differentiation in theAmericas. Proceedings of the National Academy ofSciences, 90(22): 10663-67.

Ward, Ryk H., Barbara L. Frazier, Kerry Dew-Jager,

and Svante Paabo

1991 Extensive Mitochondrial Diversity within aSingle Amerindian Tribe. Proceedings of the NationalAcademy of Sciences, 88(19):8720-24.

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*]"!ie post-Jesup (3,enturt) of f^esearch othe preKistory of fNjortheast Liberia

n

SERGEI ARUTIUNOV

The contributions of the Jesup North Pacific Expedition(1897-1902) marl<ed a giant leap in the accumulationof knowledge about the cultures and peoples ofNortheast Siberia. To the Russian participants of theExpedition, their JNPE fieldwork and subsequent pub-lication efforts were formative experiences. It alsohelped transform them into professional anthropolo-gists and key figures in the emerging field of the RussianSiberian/North Pacific/Circumpolar research. It was thusnot surprising that some twenty years later, the formerJNPE members, particularly Waldemar Bogoras (VladimirBogoraz) and Lev Shternberg, became key players inthe development of northern anthropological researchin the former Soviet Union in the 1920s and in the early1930s. Many other Russian Siberian anthropologistswho did not participate directly in the JNPE efforts were,nevertheless, well informed about this venture and itsscientific results, and were deeply influenced by them(see Krupnik 1998).

The impact of the ideas generated by Franz Boas,the intellectual and organizational leader of the JesupExpedition, on this early development of Soviet/Russian Siberian anthropology was decisive. The sub-sequent Stalinist purges and the obnoxious ideologi-cal control by the Communist Party over all kinds ofhumanitarian studies in the former Soviet Union stalledand obscured this impact over almost fifty years.However, the attempts to discredit this influence

as a manifestation of "bourgeois" ideas were reflectedin propaganda statements only. The core of Siberiananthropological research during the entire Soviet eraremained primarily evolutionist in spirit and generallyBoasian in its focus and content. In was not until re-cently that popular though superficial post-modernistapproaches were established among a portion ofRussian anthropologists during the most-recent post-Soviet years.

Three Generations of Researchers

There were several successive cohorts, or generations,of Russian (Soviet) scholars who were active in thestudy of Northeast Asia and the Russian Far East [thePacific Coast of Russia—ed.] following Bogoras,Shternberg, and Jochelson. The first cohort consistedof people born in the early 1900s, like Maxim G. Levin,Georgii F. Debetz, Nikolai N. Cheboksarov, abd AlexeiP. Okladnikov. The second cohort consisted primarilyof the students of this first generation, including ValeriiP. Alekseev, Dorian A. Sergeev, Rudolf F. Its, Nikolai N.Dikov, Yurii P. Mochanov, Anatolii P. Derev-ianko, andmany others, myself included. Our cohort became ac-tive in Russian Siberian/Far East research in the early tomid-1950s. In the 1970s, the third cohort entered thescholarly forum, and its members are currently mostactive in Russian Siberian research in anthropology andprehistory.

These three cohorts, or generations, are distinctgroups of people. They can be singled out not only inthe studies of Northeast Asia, and not only in the his-tory of Russian anthropology, in general, but perhapsin the overall history of Soviet (as well as post-Soviet)science. Many people, who were born between 1910and 1926 and who were still young in the 1940s, weredecimated during World War II. The birth rates at thepeak of the Stalinist terror and in the subsequent waryears (i.e., between 1937 and 1945) were relativelylow compared to both the preceding and the follow-ing decades. Therefore, the first generation consistedmostly of people born between 1900 and 1913; thesecond generation—of those born between 1925 and1937; and the third generation—of those born in thelate 1940s and during the 1950s, that is, well afterWorld War II. Perhaps, we can now identify the fourthcohort that consists of scholars born during the 1 960sand 1 970s. As a very promising current trend, a grow-ing number of young anthropologists have been trainedfrom among representatives of Native Siberian people,including a fairly high percentage of women. In abso-lute numbers they are still few, but the total number ofNative people across Eastern Siberia and the RussianFar East does not exceed 50,000 [excluding the Sakha/Yakut people—ed.].

In general, there was a high degree of continuitybetween these distinctive generations of scholarsin Siberian anthropology. The general framework ofscholarly approach, laid down by Boas, is highly vis-ible in publications of the key JNPE participants, suchas Waldemar Bogoras, Waldemar Jochelson, and LevShternberg, although the latter was not a direct JNPEteam member. It is still articulated in the subsequentcontributions by Levin, Debetz, Cheboksarov, andothers who either attended classes of some of the"seniors" of the "Jesup Generation" [mostly coursestaught by Bogoras in Leningrad in the 1920s—ed.]or at least were influenced by their writings. Apartfrom the influence of Franz Boas in the field of cul-tural anthropology, important intellectual beacons

for all the Russian students in Siberian anthropol-ogy had been A. Hrdliaeka in the field of physicalanthropology and V. Cordon Childe in the area ofarchaeology.

All the 'senior' scholars have greatly influenced thenext generation of Russian Siberian anthropologists.The impact was spread not only via theoretical ap-proach, which can be generally characterized asbroadly evolutionist rather than strictly Marxist, butalso by sharing the experience and practices of field-work conducted between the late 1920s and the1950s in various areas of Siberia. Among other schol-ars of the same "post-Bogoras" generation, who werenot directly affiliated with the tradition transmitted byBogoras and Shternberg, was Boris O. Dolgikh. Dolgikhwas even more deeply immersed in long-term fieldstudies in Siberia and thus, in a certain sense, hecontinued the pattern of fieldwork once determinedby the participants of the Jesup Expedition. Dolgikh'sfield experience and methods greatly influenced theendeavors of his disciples of the following (WorldWar II) generation, such as Vladimir I. Vasil'iev, Yurii B.Simchenko, Vladilen A. Tugolukov, and others.

The Joint efforts of three post-Jesup generations ofRussian Siberian scholars have elevated the status ofour knowledge about physical and cultural anthropol-ogy as well as the prehistory of Northern Eurasia to aqualitatively new and higher level compared to that ofthe turn of the twentieth century. The general back-ground of this knowledge made it possible also toadvance new scenarios of events that have happenedacross Siberia and the Northeastern tip of Asia adja-cent to North America in the course of the last three orfour millennia. These events resulted in the formationof the current ethnic and cultural mosaics of the area,mainly of the Chukotka and Kamchatka Peninsulas, andthe Kolyma River Basin in the interior portion of thepresent-day Magadan Province (oblast). The academicefforts and their results over some seventy years afterthe publication of the main JNPE Siberian volumeswere quite impressive. Nevertheless, many questions

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still remain unresolved and many more new issueshave arisen in the course of research and studiesthat could not be proposed in the time of the JesupExpedition a century ago.

Basic Milestones in Research in the SiberianNortheast

One of the basic questions in cultural (pre)history ofNortheast Asia is the transition from a mainland (inte-rior) adaptation to a maritime one, that is, when andhow the shift occurred in Arctic subsistence from hunt-ing of inland big-game mammals to the pursuit of thepinnipeds and the cetaceans on and off shore. So farwe can trace only the more or less late stages of mari-time adaptation, which undoubtedly had to be pre-ceded by a long initial evolution.

On the Russian side, archaeological studies acrossthe northeast section of Siberia (adjacent to Alaskaand the Bering Strait) began in 1945 by Sergei I.Rudenko. History repeats itself. At the turn of the cen-tury, in the time of the Jesup Expedition, the basic an-thropological research in Siberia was conducted bymany progressive-minded social activists (often, dedi-cated revolutionaries), who were exiled to this remotearea by the repressive Czarist government. In the So-viet time, a still more oppressive Stalinist regime onceagain exiled hundreds and thousands of liberal-mindedintellectuals and scholars to Siberia. Sergei Rudenkowas one of those exiles. Among the hardships of exile,he found enough energy to prepare for and to designa trip around the shores of the Chukchi Peninsula, whichhe would realize when released from his exile. In 1945,Rudenko finally was able to undertake a long and nottoo safe journey, largely in wooden and skin-boats,with Native crews around the coasts of the ChukchiPeninsula. All the difficulties notwithstanding, he man-aged to conduct a broad archaeological reconnais-sance survey and also to undertake critical excava-tions at some sites. The results of his excavationswere published in his well-known Russian mono-graph and were later translated into English by the

Arctic Institute of North America (Rudenko 1947,1961).

In the mid-1950s, Maxim G. Levin, Dorian A. Sergeev,and Nikolai N. Dikov began organizing numerous Rus-sian expeditions to this area. They contributed a largeamount of archaeological and paleoanthropological(osteological) materials that were derived from ancientpopulations of the Bering Strait area and the adjacentregions along the shores of the Chukchi Peninsula. Thiswork is now continued by the members of the nextcohort of scholars, such as Mikhail M. Bronstein, Kirill A.Dneporvskii, and others.' These materials can bematched by the data gathered by American and West-ern European archaeologists in Alaska and NorthernCanada, and viewed against a broader background ofrecently accumulated knowledge on the origins anddistribution patterns of prehistoric human populationsin the Northern part of Asia. They have enabled us toformulate some tentative new hypotheses about theformation of ancient Eskimo culture(s) in the Bering Straitarea and about its impact on populations of the adja-cent territories (cf. summaries in Fitzhugh and Crowell1988; Leskov and Muller-Beck 1993).

The Most Important Archaeological Sitesand Cultures of Northeast Asia

A good compendium of prehistoric sites and culturesof Northeast Siberia (Northeast Asia) was produced intwo volumes by Nikolai Dikov and published morethan twenty years ago (Dikov 1977, 1979). One shouldalso consult the monograph of Ruslan Vasilievskii(1973), and those of Yurii Mochanov (1977) andSvetlana Fedoseeva (1980) for the adjacent inland re-gions, basically in Yakutia (Sakha Republic). As the ba-sic ancient cultures and their most representative sitesacross the northeast (Pacific) section of Siberia are con-cerned, the complex of sites excavated by Nikolai Dikovat the Ushki Lake on Kamchatka Peninsula should beranked among the most important discoveries. Nu-merous cultural layers at the Ushki sites are safelyseparated by stripes of volcanic ashes. This provides

S. A. ARUTIUNOV

26 1

reliable absolute and relative dates for a series of Up-per Paleolithic and Neolithic cultures, which tentativelycan be compared to, and connected with, some an-cestors of Amerindian, Eskaleut, and modern Paleo-asiatic populations of this part of Northern Asia andthe adjacent regions in North America.

The discovery by Nikolai Dikov of the Chortov Ovrag(Devil's Gorge) site on Wrangel Island in the ChukchiSea is evidence of an early maritime adaptation in thenorthernmost regions of Siberia at the beginning ofthe 2nd Millennium BC. The excavations at the ChortovOvrag site produced a rough but efficient harpoon headfor hunting marine mammals. Sites of the Ust-Belskculture in the interior of the Chukchi Peninsula showdefinite connections to the ancient residents of theLena River Basin. The Ust-Belsk sites also indicate anearly penetration of bronze tools into the SiberianArctic, which were incorporated into the more or lessunchanged pedestrian hunting economy typical ofthe preceding cultural stages.

Numerous ancient archaeological sites have beendiscovered along the Russian (Siberian) side of the BeringStrait and in adjacent coastal areas. Of those the mostcritical are the Uelen and Ekven cemeteries, excavatedby the Russian teams of Maxim C. Levin, Dorian A.Sergeev, Sergei A. Arutiunov, and recently by an inter-national group led by Mikhail Bronstein and KirillDneprovskii. These two ancient Eskimo sites provideinfinitely rich material on the evolution of the Okvik,Old Bering Sea, Punuk, Birnirk, and Thule variations ofthe ancient Neo-Eskimo culture (see Arutjunov and Bron-shtein 1993; Bronshtein 1993; Dumond and Bland 2002).

Non-Archaeological Evidence and Consider-ations

According to the hypothesis of Christy Turner (1985,1988), which was based on dental features of theAmerican aboriginal populations, there have beenthree major waves of migrations from Asia to (North)America. One migration took place probably not laterthan 13,000 BP and is responsible for the ancestry

of the majority of the American Indian populations(Amerinds), with the exception of the members of theNa-Dene linguistic family (and some related groups).The second wave represented the ancestors of Na-Dene and can be tentatively dated to around 9000or 8000 BP. The third wave gave birth to the Eskimo-Aleut (Eskaleut) populations; it may be dated approxi-mately by 4000 or even 6000 BP.

From the most general viewpoint, the linguisticcomposition of the huge Eurasian continent, with theexception of its southeastern portion of mainly south-ern China and Indochina, can be reduced to only twomajor linguistic (super-)phyla. This classification is basedupon the most radical current perspectives and con-cepts in historical comparative linguistics that are ad-vocated by such modern linguists as H. Fleming, AronDolgopolskii, and Sergei Starostin. Those theories liter-ally "lump" several major language families into groupsor phyla, in this case—even in super-phyla. One of thesephyla is known as 'Nostratic' (as named by Illich-Svitych1971), and the other as 'Sino-Dagestanic' (named byStarostin 1989). The latter includes North-Caucasianlanguages; Burushaski language of the Hindukush Moun-tains, Sino-Tibetan; Yenisseic (Ket); and possibly Na-Dene language families (the position of the Basquelanguage remains unclear). The former includes all otherlanguages of Northern, Central, and Western Eurasia;its Eastern "sub-phylum" consists of the Dravidic andUralo-Altaic. There is some evidence in favor of a hy-pothesis that all of the so-called Paleo-Asiatic languagesof Siberia and the North Pacific, including the Yukagir,the Nivkh, Chukchi-Koryak, Itelmen, and also Eskaleut,and the Ainu, can be placed in a remote connectionwith this "Eastern sub-phylum" (Fleming 1987).

To date, the first Amerinds, who supposedly crossedmore than 13,000 years ago from Asia to America bythe Bering Land Bridge, could not be traced with anycertainty in any archaeological sites in Siberia. Some ofthe analogies that are often proposed—for example,by Russian archaeologist Yurii Mochanov (1969) andothers—between American and Siberian Paleolithic

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i

industries can seem spectacular. But the actual gap inmost cases is too big, both in time and space. iVlostprobably the archaeological traces of the early migrantsfrom Siberia may now all be buried deep under thewaters of the Bering Sea. Therefore, although there canbe no doubt that the ancestors of the Amerinds oncelived in Asia, so far attempts to find material indica-tions of their Asiatic habitat and connections have beenfutile.

After the first wave of Amerind ancestors' migratedto North America, the Bering Land Bridge had given itsplace to the Bering Sea. It can be assumed that thekinsmen of the Amerinds (if any), who might have re-mained in Asia, have been assimilated by another waveof migrants. The newcomers were probably from thestock of the Sino-Caucasian speakers. In eastern andnortheastern sections of Asia these were the ances-tors of the present Sino-Tibetan, Yenisseic (Ket), andNa-Dene linguistic families, and, possibly, also bearersof some intermediate linking languages, which are nowcompletely extinct.

Amerind ancestors were in all probability stronglyoriented towards large inland game hunting, sincenothing seems to indicate that there was any trendtowards a maritime adaptation among them. On theother hand, the second migration wave, that is, theancestors of the Na-Dene people, could not use theland bridge and they had to cross the Bering Strait insome type of sea-going vessels. Therefore, thesepeople had to be maritime adapted, to some extent.Most of their present westernmost descendants likethe Eyak, Haida, and the Tlingit are among the mostspecialized maritime-adapted populations in NorthAmerica. The Ket people in Siberia, the only remainingpresent-day group of the Yenisseic speakers, alsoare predominantly fishing-oriented, although they livethousands of miles away in the inland boreal forestzone of Central Siberia.

It can be assumed that fishing specialization hasdeep roots in the Final Upper Paleolithic and Mesolithiccultures of Northern and Eastern Siberia. Hence, the

present-day fishing Siberian populations belonging tothe Nostratic phylum, such as the Khanty of the ObRiver Basin or the Nivkh of the Lower Amur River andSakhalin Island, might have acquired some initial fish-ing skills from the preceding Sino-Caucasians—theYenisseic and Proto-Na-Dene (and other related extinctgroups) "substratum"—ancient inhabitants of theBeringian zone. Nikolai Dikov argued more than thirtyyears ago (Dikov 1967) that there were obvious cul-tural parallels between Paleolithic cultures of Kamchatka(as illustrated by the Ushki sites) and some prehistoriccultures of North America. The latter include Palisades,British Mountain, and Anangula. In Dikov's opinion,beyond the obvious parallels in stone tools, the shellbeads, red ocher used in burial rituals, and other cul-tural traits are strong indicators of close cultural simi-larities between the two prehistoric stocks.

If these analogies are correct, then we can assumethat the early sites in Kamchatka (dated from some-where about 13,000 BP to approximately 10,000 BPor later) preceded or could well be correlated with thealleged dates of the Na-Dene migration to NorthAmerica. Therefore, not only the linguistic affiliationof the Ushki site inhabitants can be quite possiblyNa-Dene linked; the creators of the earliest knownmaritime cultures in Alaska and the Aleutians, includ-ing the Anangula site, are believed to have been earlyNa-Dene speakers as well, rather than the Eskaleut, asis often claimed.

The migration of the Na-Dene speakers across theBering Strait could have been at least partially causedby the growing pressure of the later Nostratic migrantsto Siberia. We can logically suppose that this pressuremust have been particularly strong between 7000 and6000 BC, or between 9000 and 8000 BP. This is thetime of the earliest agricultural sites in the Northwest-ern portion of the Indostan sub-continent, which markthe hypothetical Nostratic (Dravidian) intrusion into thecontinental (northern) portion of South Asia. The move-ment of the early agriculturalists might have been par-alleled by a similar intrusion of other Eastern Nostratic

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(Old Uralic) populations from farther north into thecentral section of Northern Eurasia. The latter werenot agriculturalists but could still have been tech-nologically well-advanced. A simultaneous start ofthese two population shifts can be corroborated byan alleged greater proximity between proto-Dravidicand proto-Uralic languages, than with any otherNostratic proto-languages (Illich-Svitych 1971).

The subsequent millennia, that is 7000 to 4000 BP(5000-2000 BC) in Northern Eurasia, was the era of the"Neolithic evolution" and of the formation of the manylocal Neolithic cultures in Siberia. These were createdby the distinct though distantly related ethnic groupsof Nostratic origins, such as the Yukagir, the proto-Tungus, and the ancestors of the NortheasternPaleoasiatic populations (such as Chukchi-Koryak-Itelmen, Nivkh, etc.). They were gradually assimilating,replacing, and/or ousting out of Asia, across the BeringStrait, the remains of the preceding Sino-Caucasian(Yenisseic, Proto-Na-Dene) stock.

This earlier Sino-Caucasian substratum, while beingassimilated, might have been a significant factor in eth-nic and linguistic diversification of the incomingNostratic migrants. Even more important must havebeen their racial (i.e., physical anthropological) impact.Many physical traits of these new populations, includ-ing typically Mongoloid features, began to prevail dueto earlier processes of climatic biological adaptation.

Let us now consider the question of the positionof the Eskaleut ethno-linguistic group in this complexformation of the modern native populations of North-east Siberia. The exact data that can help answer thisquestion are rather scarce, and any speculations onthis subject can only be tentative and hypothetical.Still, an attempt at a broad integrating hypothesis canbe made, according to the data of physical anthropol-ogy (cf. Alexeev 1 993). On the one hand, the Eskimoas well as the Aleut and the Chukchi demonstrate defi-nite features of the Arctic local race. This reflects theirmillennia-long adaptation to the extreme climatic con-ditions of the Arctic. On the other hand, their relatively

dark pigmentation suggests that they belong to thePacific branch of the Mongoloid race and that initiallythey were formed in more southern latitudes than theircurrent habitat. While Asiatic Eskimo display certainevidences of recent admixture of Central Siberian popu-lations, the Aleut show some "Europeoid" (Caucasoid)deviations from the basic Mongoloid type which can-not be reduced to the late European (mostly Russian)admixture only.

There are also important archaic ethnographicparallels between ancient Eskimo and Nivkh (Cilyak)cultures (Arutiunov et al. 1972) as well as betweenthe Nivkh and the Aleut. There is also some evidenceof an early and even historical Eskaleut habitation inKamchatka (cf. Vdovin 1972). Finally, Nikolai Dikov,who insisted upon some obvious Amerind parallels inone of the Ushki sites in Kamchatka, argued thatthere were definite Eskaleut (Eskimo) parallels at an-other, later Ushki site.

The Cultural Peak of the North Pacific Mari-time Adaptation in Siberia

The cultures that can be considered the highestachievements of the Arctic maritime adaptation inNortheast Siberia were the classic forms of the OldBering Sea and Punuk cultures of the Bering Strait area.Surprisingly, their basic cultural features first appearedin sites of almost three millennia ago in a practicallyready-made form. From its known beginnings, thesecultures demonstrate an astonishingly high number offeatures which are almost identical to the modern stageof cultural development identified by the ethnographicdata. The features that differentiate the modern cul-ture from the culture of nearly three millennia ago arerather less important and minor. Probably, nowhere inthe world can we observe such a high degree of cul-tural continuity, with so little change in the course ofmillennia.

This may signif/ that the sea animal hunting adap-tation of the Bering Strait Eskimo people has reachedthe maximum level of its possible development in a

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pre-industrial context. We may speculate that this highlysophisticated culture was not imported to the BeringStrait area from some other territories in a ready-madeform. Rather, it was assembled and developed toIts utmost perfection here from a number of mutuallyadjusted cultural "details." Many of those "details" mighthave been introduced from some other areas in whichthey had originally developed.

We may hypothetically single out two main direc-tions of such cultural diffusions. One venue of criticalcultural influence came from the shores of the ArcticOcean, from the mouths of the great Siberian rivers.The other input came most probably from the south,from the Sea of Okhotsk shores, mainly from the areasto the north of the Amur River. Here it received someimportant influences from the more southerly regions.The first stream clearly can be traced via ancient tradi-tions of Eskimo decorative ornamentation. It introducedthe exquisite technique of engraved straight and punc-tuated lines, points and circles that are visible alreadyin the bone industry of the Burulgino site of the para-Ymyyakhtakh cultural affiliation in the present-dayYakutia (Sakha Republic). The second stream, probablyhaving its origins somewhere near the Sea of Japan,brought with it the rich curvilinear designs, t'ao-t'ieh-like images, and fantastic faces. The harpoon technol-ogy was most probably developed independently inboth of these two cultural traditions. It reached its highlevel of perfection in the Bering Strait area.

The late Old Bering Sea and the subsequent Punukcultural traditions seem to have been the peak ofartistic, social, and food-obtaining efficiency of themaritime-adapted cultures at the Bering Strait "Cross-roads." It was probably the Little Ice Age of AD 1 500-1 700 that brought about a relative deterioration ofthe environmental abundance. Consequently, the rela-tive artistic, social, and cultural impoverishment of thecoastal population occurred. This same environmentaltrend, however, triggered the rise of a Native reindeer-breeding economy in the interior regions of Siberia(Krupnik 1993). Thus, around AD 1 500-1 700, a critical

and partly regressive transition took place, with asignificant portion of the formerly sedentary coastalpopulation moving inland and becoming nomadic. Itsresults are well observed in the historically documenteddiversity of Native cultures and economies in North-east Siberia (cf. Krupnik 1988).

Conclusion

The current destiny and the future of the sea-mammalhunting culture of Northeast Asia are currently evenless clear than its remote past. The Native maritimehunting economy in Siberia has been able somehowto endure, although in a very deformed and distortedcondition, under the artificial paternalism of the Sovietsystem. Now, under the stress of transition to a mar-ket economy, the prospects for its continuity are verydim. On the other hand, the beauty and sophisticationof technical and artistic achievements of the ancientEskimo and their Siberian neighbors may become and,in fact, is currently emerging as a new source of inspi-ration, pride, and cultural reassertion of identity for theirmodern descendants

Acknowledgements

The author expresses his gratitude to the Kennan Insti-tute for Advanced Russian Studies in Washington, DC,which partly sponsored his work on this paper.

Notes

1. See the most recent summary of the currentRussian archaeological research on the ChukchiPeninsula and in the adjacent areas of the NorthPacific in several papers published in Dumond andBland 2002

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1 993 Ekven—einzigartigearchaologische Fundstellein Nordostasien. In Arktische Waljdger vor 3000Jahren. A.Leskov and H.Muller-Beck, eds. Pp. 73-82.Mainz-Munich: Hase & Koehler Verlag.

Dikov, Nikolai N.

1967 Otkrytie paleolita na Kamchatke i problemapervonachainogo zaselenia Ameriki (The Discoveryof the Paleolithic (Sites) in Kamchatka and the Prob-lem of the Original Peopling of America). TrudySevero-Vostochnogo Kompleksnogo Instituta 1 7: 16-31. Moscow.

1977 Arkheologicheskie pamiatniki Kamchatki,Chukotki i Verkhnei Kolymy. Aziia na styke s AmerikoiV drevnosti (Archeological Sites of Kamchatka,Chukotka, and the Upper Kolyma Area. Asia JoiningAmerica in Prehistory). Moscow: Nauka.

1979 Drevnie kultury Severo-Vostochnoi Azii. Aziia nastyke s Amerikoi v drevnosti {Ancient Cultures of North-

east Asia. Asia Joining America in Prehistory). Mos-cow: Nauka.Dumond, Don E., and Richard L. Bland, eds.

2002 Archaeology in the Bering Strait Region. Uni-versity of Oregon Anthropological Papers 59. Eugene.Fedoseeva, Svetlana A.

/ 9 79 Ymyyakhtakhskaia Kultura Severo-VostochnoiAzii (The Ymyyakhtakh Culture of Northeast Asia).Novosibirsk: Nauka.

Fitzhugh, William W., and Aron Crowell, eds.

1 988 Crossroads of Continents: Cultures of Siberiaand Alaska. Washington, DC: Smithsonian InstitutionPress.

Fleming, H. C.

1 987 Toward a Definitive Classification of the WorldLanguages. International Journal for Historical Linguis-tics 4: 1 55-223.

Illich-Svitych, V. M.

1971 Opyt sravneniia nostraticheskikh iazykov (At-tempt at Comparative Study of the Nostratic Lan-guages). Moscow.

Krupnik, Igor I.

1 988 Economic Patterns in Northeastern Siberia. InCrossroads of Continents: Cultures of Siberia andAlaska. William W. Fitzhugh and Aron Crowell, eds.Pp. 183-191. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institu-tion.

1 993 Arctic Adaptations. Native Whalers and Rein-deer Herders of Northern Eurasia. Hanover: UniversityPress of New England.

1 998 "Jesup Genealogy." Intellectual Partnership andRussian-American Cooperation in Arctic/North Pa-cific Anthropology. Part 1: From the Jesup Expedi-tion to the Cold War, 1897-1948. Arctic Anthropol-ogy 35(2): 199-225.

Leskov, Aleksandr M., and Hans Muller-Beck,

eds.

1993 Arktische Waljdger vor 3000Jahren. Unbekannte

sibirische Kunst. Mainz-Munchen: Hase & Koehler.Mochanov, Yurii A.

1 969 Drevneishie etapy zaselenia Severo-Vostoch-noi Azii i Alaski (Ancient Stages in Human Peoplingof Northeast Asia and Alaska). Sovetskaia etnografia1: 79-87.

1977 Drevneishie etapy zaselenia chelovekom Severo-Vostochnoi Azii (Ancient Stages of Human Peoplingof Northeast Asia). Novosibirsk: Nauka.

Mudrak, Oleg A.

1984 K voprosu o vneshnikh sviaziakh eskimosskikhiazykov (To the Issue of External Connections of theEskimo Languages). In Lingvisticheskaia rekonsruktsiiai drevneishaia istoria Vostoka. 1: 64-8. Moscow.

Okladnikov, Alexei P., ed.

1975 Yukagiry.istoriko-etnograficheskii ocherk (The

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Yukagir: Historical and Cultural Synopsis). Novosibirsk:Nauka.Rudenko, Sergei I.

1947 Drevniaia kukura Beringova moha i eski-mosskaia problema. Moscow and Leningrad:Clavsevmorput'. Translated as: The Ancient Cultureof the Bering Sea and the Eskimo Problem. ArcticInstitute of North America Translation from RussianSources 1. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1961.

Shternberg, Lev Ya.

1933 Cilyaki, orochi, goi'dy, negidal'tsy, ainy (Jhe

Gilyak, Orich, Negidal, and the Ainu). Khabarovsk.Simchenko, Yuri B.

1976 Kultura okhotnikov na olenei Severnoi Evrazii[The Culture of Reindeer (Caribou) Hunters in North-ern Asia]. Moscow: Nauka.

Starostin, Sergei A.

1989 Sravnitel'no-istoricheskoe iazykoznanie ileksiko-statistika (Comparative-Historical Linguisticsand Lexico-Statistics). In Lingvisticheskaia rekon-struktsiia i drevneisliaia istoriia Vostoka 1: 1-39.Moscow.

Swadesh, Morris

1 962 Linguistic Relations across Bering Strait. Ameri-can Anthropologist 64(6): 1262-91.Turner, Christy G. II

1985 The Dental Search for Native American Ori-

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1 988 Ancient Peoples of the North Pacific Rim. InCrossroads ofContinents: Cultures of Siberia and Alaska.William W. Fitzhugh and Aron Crowell, eds. Pp. 111-6. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press.

Tyler, S. A.

1 968 Dravidian and Uralian: The Lexical Evidence.

Language 44 (4). Baltimore.Uesson, A. M.

1970 On Linguistic Affinity. The Indo-Uralic Problem.Malmo.

Vasiliev, Vladimir I.

1971 Siirtia- legenda Hi real'nost (Siirtia - Legend orReality). Sovetskaia Etnografia 1: 151-7.

1979 Problemy formirovaniia severo-samodiiskikhnarodnostei (\ssues in the Formation of the NorthernSamoyedic Peoples). Moscow: Nauka.

Vasilievskii, Ruslan S.

1972 Drevnie kultury Tikhookeanskogo Severa (AncientCultures of the North Pacific). Novosibirsk: Nauka.

Vdovin, Innokenti S.

1972 Sledyaleutsko-eskimosskoikul'turynatikhooke-anskom poberezh'e Kamchatki (The Traces of anAleut-Eskimo Culture on the Kamchatka Pacific Shore).Strany I narody Vostoka 13:41-51. Moscow: Nauka.

S. A. ARUTIUNOV

267

Life in Lost SjsWa^CS: Mome, Land, Memort) and tli<Senses of Loss in fost-Jesup Ivamciiatka

DAVID KOESTER

This paper is about social absence, that is, about theabsence of irreducibly social aspects of experience. Itis about the contemporary significance of closed anddying Native villages in Kamchatka, in the Russian FarEast. To suggest a metaphor for my strategy here, onemight think of the following analysis as an inquiry intowhat would happen to the fabric of social life if someforce were to snip threads throughout the weave, leav-ing behind a set of connections that seem randomwithout their previous supports. This is not to askwhat would happen if certain roles were not filledor specific reciprocal obligations were not met; suchoccurs regularly when individuals in a communityleave or die. Rather, it is about what happens when,for example, the possibilities for maintaining obli-gations, fulfilling plans and expectations have dis-appeared, when a rupture has occurred in the con-tinuing process of re-establishing familial ties throughthe daily experience of places where memories aregenerated or when the skills and understandingsone has learned no longer contribute to one's rela-tionships in one's community.

In examining social relations and loss, I will notpresent a culturological vision of society in which allcomponents of the socio-cultural system fit togetherin a functioning whole, only to point out the subse-quent gaps. My aim is, rather, to examine the natureand formation of durable interconnections in social life.My argument is that specific features of the socialunderstanding of loss help to make sense of the rela-

tive success and failure at current efforts in culturalrevitalization among the Native peoples in Siberiawhose ancestors were surveyed by the teams of theJesup Expedition one hundred years ago.

The phenomena of social absence that I will de-scribe are familiar to anthropologists. An historicalexample, well known in the North Pacific, is the ban-ning of the potlatch on the Canadian Northwest Coast,against which Franz Boas and others protested vigor-ously (Stocking 1974:307; Boas 1 974[1 899]: 1 06;Cole and Chaikin 1990:130-1). Boas had arguedthat the potlatch was part of the Indian economicsystem, a public paying of debts that was at thesame time an investment in one's future. It obli-gated recipients to repay at a later time and therebyencouraged the giver to give freely so as to havemore to receive:

The sudden abolition of this system. . .destroys therefore all the accumulatedcapital of the Indians. It undoes the carefullyplanned life-work of the present generation,exposes them to need in their old age, andleaves the orphans unprovided for (Boas1974[1899]:106).

Boas' argument implied that even with perfor-mances banned, the social effectiveness, the obliga-tions still existed as long as people remembered themand remembered the status that went along with giv-ing and receiving. He remarked, in his polemic to pro-tect the tradition, that we should not be surprised thatabolition was resisted by what he called "the best

269

class" of Indians, "only the lazy should support it, be-cause it relieves them of the duty of paying their debts"(Boas 1974[1899]:106). Political goals aside, Boas'spoint was that the silencing of the practice opened agap in the set of relations by which people interactedand lived.

The rapid decline of indigenous populations andthe curtailing of traditionally held practices by ex-ternal cultural and economic influences and govern-mental authorities led anthropologists to undertakemajor salvage operations. The Jesup Expedition, withits variety of salvage activities, became a foundingand exemplary model. The aims of salvage ethnol-ogy and linguistics in the U.S. were to establish anaccount of how Native American cultures variedgeographically and to inscribe in a durable repre-sentative form as much as possible of languages,customs, practices and general information concern-ing the lives the various peoples led and the storiesthey would tell before those ways of life and sto-ries passed away. This recording was done, as Ber-nard Cohn has pointed out, by stripping away theobvious signs of White influence and focusing onfeatures that seemed peculiarly Native (Cohn 1968).The task was to record as much as possible, beforethe last generation that could tell of the prior way oflife disappeared.

Today's cultural revival movements across theNorth Pacific, with their attention on preserving lan-guage and tradition, sometimes resemble salvageanthropology. For the most part, however, they aremuch more attuned to specific sentiments of lossand contemporary needs of economic development(e.g., Abryutina 1996; Stroganova 1997; Fondahl1998: 89-131).' I focus here not on the practicalissues of cultural restoration or the salvaging act ofpreserving in writing and other media that whichwas passed down through emulation, imitation andteaching. Instead, I examine the meaning of the lossof that which was taken away or displaced by gov-ernment policy.

To explain what it means to lose one's village, Ipresent here descriptions of three senses of the ideaof life in a "lost village." These descriptions are basedon published texts, songs, poetry and narratives Irecorded during fieldwork in indigenous communitiesin Kamchatka during the early-mid 1 990s. The first senseis a past-oriented sentiment toward life in the villageslost when resettlement was forced by Soviet economicpolicies of the 1950s and 1960s.^ These closed vil-lages still today constitute "original homelands," placesof personal and familial identification. Many people,including young people, say that they are descendantfrom Utkholok or descendant from Sopochnoe, villagesthat no longer exist. These settlements were "closed"(that is, abandoned under government pressure)some thirty or even fifty years ago. The youngestwho claim to be descendant from them may nevereven have seen them. An important second senseof loss is that people now feel that, because of thepost-Soviet rupture in communication, funding, anddelivery of social services they are living in villagesthat are "lost" to the outside world. They recognizethat the governmental responsibility that once sup-ported rural Soviet village life has disintegrated andfeel that no one cares about their plight. Contem-porary life for them now is life in a "lost village." Andfinally, a third sense of life in lost villages is the at-tempt of various groups of people to live in villagesonce closed, to actually establish, or reestablish, lifein these lost villages.^

Village Ties Expressed in Poetry

In a general discussion of the experience of placeKeith Basso has written that, "Relationships to placesmay. . . find expression through the agencies of myth,prayer, music, dance, art, architecture, and in many com-munities, recurrent forms of religious and political ritual"(Basso 1996:57). The various ways for place to be ex-perienced and articulated includes the meaning ofvillage life as it is and has been expressed in poetry,both written and in song. The four poems examined

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here issue from differing points of view. All of indig-enous Kamchatkan origin, two of the authors still livein the villages of which they write and the other twolive in Kamchatka's capital city, Petropavlovsk. For oneof them her natal village no longer exists.

The first example is a song by a young ItelmencomposerAnatoly Levkovsky(Levkovskii), born in 1962(Fig. 64). It was his first song and he composed itwhile he was in Moscow, missing his home village ofKovran on the western shore of Kamchatka.'' It is en-titled simply, "My Village" and the melody is simpleand straightforward as are the ideas. In the followingtranslation I have cut out repetitions, in part melodi-cally motivated, that emphasize that he loves and willnever leave his village.

My little village is set out by the sea.My beloved native home.I'll never leave it behind,it's dear to me.Our people are unpretentious,I'll never leave it behind,indeed they are talented craftspeopleMy family lives here and my many relatives.We all love you village.There is no limit to our love.^(Levkovsky 1997)

For Levkovsky, his family, his relatives, his peopleshare the affection they feel toward the village andthat shared affection is his affection. He loves Kovranas his home, as the place of his people. His apprecia-tion for the village also derives from the practical wayin which people make their lives there.^

Levkovsky is director of cultural activities for thevillage of Kovran and he still lives there, in the place ofhis birth.

Tatiana Evstropovna Cutorova, a published author—renowned for her singing voice—was also born inKovran. She now lives with her children and grand-children in the city of Petropavlovsk. In 1994, at a

gathering of Itelmens and Kamchadals' in the hotspring area of Upper Paratunka, she sang a songin Itelmen that she had composed specially forthe occasion. Addressed to her sister, her songwas a doleful lament, performed in the style ofthe Itelmen traditional khodila^ and composedabout the village and the relatives whom shemisses. It echoes the same theme of love for thevillage associated with its inhabitants.

Swans took flight at dawnTheir cries resoundedas if they were weepingAt once my heart yearnedthey're flying past KovranMy village, my KovranI cannot forget

As if some evil demon is holding me

I cannot break loose

The geese are going to fly over Kovran

They will circle over my village

I send warm greetings

I miss my fellow Kovraners

Cod give me wings

I will fly to my village

My soul will be calmed among my kin

I'll walk throughout the village

(Recorded by the author, 3 July1994, in Itelmen)''

Tatiana Evstropovna herself explained in Russianthe meaning of the poem to me from which thetranslation here. With the village of her birth still inexistence her song evokes ties to the village throughkin and through the experience of its topography.In the images of circling over and walking through-out the village (particularly in contrast to being held,unable to break loose) her feeling of loss and ofattachment to the place is expressed as memoryand desire. The poem sets in opposition the far away

D. KOESTER

distance to the village, marked by flight and thegrounded contact of walking through the village.

These two songs about ties to Kovran through itslandscape and people can be contrasted with a po-etic cycle of verses about the town of Milkovo, thehometown of Kamchadal poet, Nina Berezhkova-Porotova. Milkovo, in central Kamchatka, is muchlarger than Kovran and its present-day population ispredominantly of Russian origin. Many of its indigenousKamchadals have been active in local cultural revital-ization and have established a Kamchadal Club. Lesstied to people-in-the-place, the opening lines and muchof the remaining ten verses of Berezhkova-Porotova'spoem extoll natural beauty, the permanent features ofthe landscape, dramatic changes of season and thefamiliar, relatively unchanging characteristics of plantand animal life. Rather than writing of people in theenvironment, she humanizes the landscape:

Milkovo in a valley cradle

Was hidden under a down-coat of snow

The mountains put on a snowy malakhai[hood in Itelmen]

they hid a grey tress in ravines

(Berezhkova-Porotova 1993:11-2)

As in the two songs above, Berezhkova-Porotova'ssentiments toward the place are linked to an elderrelative. The title verse, "I've been panged by Milkovosince childhood" reflects on the tale of the author'sgrandmother, who sought to defend the village churchwhen Soviet officials came to take away its bell. Otherverses recall childhood, and give vignettes of tradi-tional life, sprinkled with Itelmen words (Berezhkova-Porotova 1993:7-15). This poem, about a relativelyurbanized village, contrasts with the two about rural,predominantly Itelmen Kovran in its greater emphasison the aesthetic features of the natural environmentand more specific focus on a single close relative inrelation to a single historical event.'° Her tie to a rela-tive-in-the-place is less participatory than that ex-

pressed by Levkovsky or Cutorova, yet is neverthelessan important aspect of her nostalgia.

Itelmen poet Nelia Suzdalova (born in 1937) simi-larly included a poem about her native villageSopochnoe in a prominent place in her first publishedpoetic collection (1993). It followed the opening poem"Dog Teams" from which the entire collection gets itsname, "Those dog teams sped away." The image of adog team disappearing in the distance metonymicallyand symbolically refers to the loss of traditional cul-tural life. Soviet government-enforced resettlementsof Itelmen villagers for the purposes of consolidatingthe labor force and economizing on delivery of ser-vices began in 1956 (Starkova 1976:32). The nextpoem in the collection, entitled simply, "Sopochnoe"reflects the feelings from that period and Suzdalova'ssense of loss with the closing of her village.

We have grown up and died on our land

And expected always to live here...

At the whispers of the forest,

we stood still in happiness.

There was no time to grieve.

But the time arrived—bad news.

The river became a mere legend.

In a foreign region, in a cold place

Centuries came to a halt.

Farewell warmth, goodbye, mountains.

And you too, moon, above our homeland,

An evil alien pushed a button.

And the strand broke.

(Suzdalova 1993:3-4)

Suzdalova emphasizes the continuity of ances-try at her homeland, affirmed by life and death onthe land. The warmth and happiness associatedwith this continuity contrast with the mechanicalcoldness that replaced them and, as in Cutorova'ssong, an arbitrary, unhindered power has causedtheir loss.

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In all of these odes to villages the tie to the home-land is through people and relationships to thosepeople, especially ancestral. Such sentiments seen andheard expressed in these examples of published andperformed poetry, were also echoed in remembrancesthat I recorded on various occasions. A respectedItelmen elder, teacher and cultural expert, Yakov LvovichZhirkov, for example, also spoke of life in the village ofSopochnoe at a presentation for children. He spokeon the occasion of Itelmen language week in the vil-lage school:

In childhood I lived with my grandfathers{dedy- male elders). There were many eldersthere, grandmothers {babushki- femaleelders), my parents. And I had to live in theforest and out fishing. They brought meeverywhere with them, when it turned spring.When I was little they took me fishing,hunting, though I never really hunted and didnot become a hunter. I walked and wan-dered but did not hunt. Everything aroundme gave me pleasure. I looked at thisnature, at the richness that we had. Nowthere is no village (Zhirkov 1 994).

It is important to note in this statement how therelations with his elders tied him to the natural environ-ment. His memory, the lost experience that he soughtto convey to today's children, was that of living andworking in the forest and on the tundra with kin andfellow villagers. Another elder from Sopochnoe, TatianaPetrovna Lukashkina (born in 1918; Fig. 65), who losther parents in the Stalinist repressions, has similarlyfocused much of her reminiscence of childhood onthe elder who raised her, her blind grandmother. BothTatiana Petrovna and Yakov Lvovich placed valuenot on just the relative alone or just the place, butprimarily on their experiences of and with their rela-tives in the village and its environs. The focus on recol-lections of family and village life tied to the land isreminiscent of sentiments about places recorded inother parts of the world. Writing of Wamirans in PapuaNew Guinea, Kahn notes that for them, places in thelandscape "resonate . . . deeply about the importance

of social relations and obligations based on feeding,sharing and caring for one another" (1996:1 76; cf. alsoRosaldo 1980).

Lost Villages I: Living in the Past

With Suzdalova's poem and the recountings by Zhirkovand Lukashkina we have come to sentiments about avillage closed several decades ago by a Soviet policydecision. As we move to consideration of the signifi-cance of such closed villages it is important to keep inmind that people's recollections represent compleximages overlain by the profound effects of Soviet eco-nomic and cultural programs. Attuned to effecting achange of consciousness, much of the former Sovietpolicy sought specifically to patch and replace ele-ments of the social-economic fabric it was destroying.For Itelmen in Kamchatka, increasingly year-round settle-ments replaced summer/winter seasonal habitation andstate-run boarding schools (internaty) replaced localschools. State-supported and managed clubhouse("house of culture") activities, including the celebrationof holidays, came to replace both church attendanceand festivities associated with winter visiting. Brigadework (organized production teams) replaced family-,friendship- and need-determined cooperative produc-tion, and so on (Starkova 1976). In the wake of thesetransformations, what seems consistent in recollectionsand laments about the past is the sense of loss ofcommunity tied to a place and associated with prac-tical activity over time.

Despite socially engineered, "progressive" replace-ments for various aspects of social life, most peopleremember the closing of the villages as a devastatingblow." Over and over again, elders have said to methat life was hard in earlier days, but it was better; we"lived amicably" (zMf/ruzAj/io), they say. They acknowl-edge that their fond memories are somewhat gildedby the flow of time.'-^ They speak of how laborioussubsistence was, that they did not have readily avail-able flour, bread and tea as appeared later. Yet theynevertheless maintain that this time was happy, and

D. KOESTER

273

they associate this lost happier life with the move fromthe villages.

Bruce Grant found loss of Native villages on SakhalinIsland (another area covered by the Jesup Expedition)to be comparably significant. The primary differencewas that the village closings in Sakhalin during the19505 and 1960s took place on a much larger scalethere than in Kamchatka. He writes that Soviet inten-tions to improve economic prospects in villages byconsolidating labor in efficient administrative centersproved vain hopes:

Rather than strengthening and international-izing, the resettlements produced a spirit ofabsence felt on economic, social, andpersonal levels. Ratherthan moving forward,they generated a retro-spective force thatpulled many back (Grant1993:244).

The closed villages came torepresent a longed-for, lost wayof life in Sakhalin, as they did inKamchatka. Moreover, Grantfound that the lost way of lifehas been understood to be tra-ditional. It is in part because ofthis understood traditionalitythat the closed villages havebecome an object of interestfor cultural revivalists. Grantcites the example of the lonebrigadier who, having refusedto leave when the resettlementstook place, now stands as symbol and metonymicsign of traditional life (Grant 1995:134).

Itelmen people who today live in the villages ofKovran, Verkhne Khairiuzovo, Tigil, Sedanka and evenin the city of Petropavlovsk (Fig. 79) still inhabit theselost villages in their memories. Experiences on a dailybasis ranging from negative ones such as family ten-sion, drunkenness, and economic hardship to morepositive ones of family celebration, collective singing

Sea ofOkhotsk

79/ Location of Lost Villages on KamchatkaPeninsula, Russia, discussed in the paper

and dancing all evoke memories of contrasting andcomparable experiences in the old villages. Elderscommonly remark, for example, that there was nodrunkenness in their childhood villages. People drank,they acknowledge, and enjoyed doing so, but the al-coholic kind of public drunkenness now common was,they say, unknown.

The experiences of entering new village life afterforced resettlement contributed greatly to the memo-ries that create today's sense of loss. Soviet planners'aim was not, in the initial move, to create (or recreate)a village, but to provide a place for workers to live.When resettled villagers arrived in Kovran in 1960, theyfound that promised housingwas not yet constructed andthey were placed in temporaryhousing (barracks). Life was,from all descriptions, difficult.Local administrators movedquickly to establish work asthe basis for social relations inthe relocated community. Stra-tegically, their mission was toreplace older village social val-ues with the value of work forthe greater society. The effec-tiveness of this effort is articu-lated in the first memories thatresettled villagers recount—self-worth and status amongpeers were to be linked to dili-gent labor and productivity.'^Prestige was granted to those who worked hard,achievements in production were recognized on a pub-lic honor roll and prizes were awarded. Several Itelmenelders recounted to me the thrill of a family memberreceiving a "premium"—sometimes extra rations of flour,and sugar and in one case I heard of, a new rifle. But,although there were individual rewards, the differen-tiation that took place is now also remembered in in-tergroup terms. One woman told me repeatedly, when

PacificOcean

'etropavlovsk

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recollecting her resettlement to Kovran, that the peoplefrom her native village of Sopochnoe knew how towork. She also said, however, that they had unfairlybeen accused by Kovraners of being slackers. Neitheran ideology nor merely a command, this shaping ofrelations by means of instilling a competitive work ethicwas given added moral weight, founded in praxis, wheninternally segmented others were perceived in com-parative, competitive terms. Public support was givento intergroup competition by the publication of vil-lage, kolkhoz (common Russian abbreviation for 'col-lective farm'-ed.) and brigade production rankings.

This value of competitive work continues todayeven in non-wage labor contexts. When I joined groupsof people traveling with kolkhoz tractors (the kolkhozwas defunct but still alive in name) out to gather thelocal "wild garlic," cheremsha, on what seemed in manyrespects to be a community outing, some familiestalked distinctly in productive terms. For these fami-lies much of the conversation focused on how muchthey could gather and how quickly. The emphasis onproductivity, whether constructed as competitionamong siblings or among members of a work brigade,refers back in time to the larger Soviet social economicproject in which rationalized, quantifiable productionaims were the goal. This focus on time-intensified pro-duction contrasts starkly with the image of life inSopochnoe portrayed by Yakov Lvovich Zhirkov, how-ever nostalgically embellished. His description of wan-dering and working in the forests, composing songs inresponse to the beauty of nature, lacked any sense ofurgency or competitiveness.

It would not, however, be right to say that thework ethic was introduced with the forced migrationsin the 1950s and 1960s. Collectivization in Kamchatka,including in remote Native communities, had alreadyoccurred in the 1930s (Starkova 1976:30) and manyelders' recollections of productive activities rehearsequantitative competitive notions. Moreover, theinstilling of competition did not constitute the intro-duction of the idea, or the valuing, of hard work. Tatiana

Petrovna Lukashkina, who participated actively in theSoviet project to modernize the lives of the Nativepeoples of Kamchatka, has written that the Itelmenwere always a work-loving people (trudoliubivye).

Whether before or after resettlement, the socialrelation created in the Soviet-inspired world of workwas not to the community but to the productive ap-paratus. Though it would be too hasty to concludethat social valuation by competitive work was entirelyintroduced by the Soviet government, this value, nev-ertheless, contrasts with the image given by YakovLvovich Zhirkov. In his remembrance of a young boybeing dragged along to work in the forests and on theriver, "work" created ties to people he deeply respected,the memories of whom tie him to his homeland. Thecompetitive work relations, in contrast, while givingmany a sense of self-worth, divided people and pro-vided no sense of ties to a place.

When elders say that they lived more amicably inthe past it reflects this difference in productive rela-tions. Whereas in the past subsistence activity tiedpeople to places through collective efforts with el-ders, after resettlement, productive effort was pur-posefully generated by prestige stratification. Statuswas conferred individually and collectively and articu-lated in recollections as inter- and intra-village groupdifference. The social absence mentioned in the intro-duction is sensed, I would suggest, largely in this tran-sition from affective relations created through coop-erative work to social differentiation created in state-controlled labor.

Lost Villages II: Lost in Today's World

The second sense of loss emerges from the collapseof support for Soviet village infrastructure during the1990s, especially between 1991 and 1997. Many ofthe factors of loss present in Itelmen villages inKamchatka have been discussed in the literature onmore general economic and social problems facingSiberian indigenous people in post-Soviet Russia (Pikaand Grant 1999; Ryvkina et al. 1996; Zaidfudim et al.

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1994). Kamchatka was spared the worst of thecatastrophic environmental damage that took placeduring the Soviet period in Siberia, such as thatwhich occurred in the West Siberian oil and gas fields,devastating landscapes and curtailing subsistencebased on natural resources (Trumbull 1995; Wiget andBalalaeva 1997; Feshbach and Friendly 1992:137-8).On the other hand, significant environmental degrada-tion due to industrialization and localized overpopula-tion has taken place in Kamchatka. These days, peopleneed to make day-long trips to gather berries, fire-wood is increasingly difficult to obtain and fewer andfewer salmon are coming up river. Thus, it is importantto enumerate some of the consequences of with-drawal of governmental support.

During the 1950s and 1960s, the Soviet govern-ment orchestrated the construction of new villagesfor Native people in Kamchatka consisting of smallwooden houses that required firewood for heatingor larger apartment buildings that required coal inthe winter. As electrification came, in the form offuel-dependent diesel generator stations, all house-holds became equipped with stoves and utensils forcooking with electricity. Radio was brought in by cableand telephone along with it. Stores were suppliedwith basic foodstuffs, including flour, pasta, tea, sugar,cereal grains, and pickled and canned fruits and veg-etables. The village of Kovran (Fig. 66) had its owndairy, bakery, public bathhouse, post office and club-house where movies were shown and people cameto meet. Helicopters regularly flew from village to vil-lage and it was often possible for villagers to hitchhikefor travel to school, work or even just to visit relatives.Ground transportation from the nearby airport in Ust-Khairiuzovo was organized by the kolkhoz to meetscheduled flights from Petropavlovsk. The end of theSoviet Union meant that collapse of these governmentservices. In the five-year period from 1992-7, exceptfor the houses, and occasional and unreliable servicefrom the telephones, the bathhouse and the post of-fice, virtually everything I have listed has fallen away.

Village electricity was cut to three hours a day, thebakery died fitfully from shortages of firewood, thedairy's cows either died or were sold for meat orprivate use, the clubhouse which burned down justbefore this period was not to be restored (Fig. 68)and the store, by 1996, sold little more than tea, con-fections and vodka (Fig. 67). Travel became very diffi-cult as helicopters began to fly only commercial andemergency traffic, allowing fewer and eventually nohitchhikers, and the regular "bus" from Ust-Khairiuzovobecame increasingly unreliable and eventually ceasedto run altogether. All of this would clearly give anyonea sense of material loss.'"

The social sense of loss that I want to describe is,however, a deeper feeling of isolation and helpless-ness. I have written elsewhere about villagers' deci-sion in 1993 to write a letter to the U.N. to ask forassistance (Koester n.d.). The letter came out of a meet-ing of school teachers with Itelmen Cultural Restora-tion Council'"^ leaders to discuss the annual festivalAlkhalalalai. The topic of conversation constantlyturned from the festival to problems in the village. Asvillage leaders described their futile attempts to gethelp from both the regional and the district adminis-trations, those attending the meeting increasingly be-gan to talk about being forgotten. They complainedof the difficulties of reaching ever-absent bureaucratsover correspondingly unreliable phone lines, and theimpossible expense and time required to fly to theregional capital town of Palana, some 270 km to thenorth. Finally, as the idea to write to the U.N. emergedone person said, "Our government has no use for us."This summarized the collective sentiment and muchof the sense of lostness.

Kovran, like so many other Native Siberian com-munities (Fig. 69), was for decades economically de-pendent on supplies from outside and along with this,after many years of hearing of "the proud feeling ofbelonging in the one great Soviet Homeland" (Moiseev1989:16), the sentiment developed that relationshipsand reciprocal obligations built up in the construction

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of these Soviet villages were to the country and to thegovernment. Thus, the villagers did not just feel cutoff, they felt cast aside; their effort in living and work-ing in the village no longer brought reciprocation fromthe state and no longer contributed to a "feeling ofbelonging" to the country as a whole.

Lost Villages III: Living in Closed Villages

From the time of the founding in 1989 of the firstNative organization in Kamchatka, the Itelmen CulturalRestoration Council Tkhsanom, the longing for homevillages that I described in Part I played a significantrole in plans for restoration. People had persistentdreams of re-establishing their lives on the sites of theclosed villages. The village of Sopochnoe figured promi-nently in these plans. It was the southernmost villagein which the Itelmen language was spoken whenWaldemar Jochelson visited the west coast of Kam-chatka in 1910 0ochelson n.d.:2). It consisted of aboutfourteen households in the 1930s and remained pre-dominantly Itelmen speaking. A school was createdin Sopochnoe in 1924 when virtually no one in thevillage spoke Russian. Then, in the 1930s, school policywas changed from encouraging Native languages tobanning of them on school grounds and at that pointthe changeover took place very rapidly. Sopochnoeis of particular significance because its descendantshave played such a prominent role in Native culturallife in Kamchatka of the twentieth century. TatianaPetrovna Lukashkina, who was born in Sopochnoe, wasthe first Itelmen woman to receive a higher education(1934-8) and she was involved in the transformationof Kamchatkan dance to forms appropriate for per-formance on stage (Lukashkina 1991:53^). After herreturn from the Institute of Peoples of the North inLeningrad in 1938, she spent the rest of her life as aneducator in outposts and small villages of the Kam-chatkan north (Fig. 70). Sopochnoe was also the homevillage of the first president of the Restoration Council,Klavdia Nikolaevna Khaloimova (born in 1934) and ofothers who were active in the beginnings of the cul-

tural restoration movement, including Boris Zhirkov(born in 1946), a noted dancer and local folklorist.

At the third annual Itelmen cultural revival con-ference in 1989 a decision was taken to supportresettlement at Sopochnoe. In March of 1991 aNative fishing artel (cooperative) named "Itelmen"was officially registered with the regional administra-tion. They received a fishing quota and began work atthe former village site of Sopochnoe in the summer.The fishing went well by most accounts but the wholeventure ended badly. The artel got a low price for itsfish in Petropavlovsk so that there was very little returnfor the workers. In the meantime, they had alienatedthe local fish processing factory, whose fishing limitthey had usurped, by sending the fish to Petropavlovskrather than to it. And while the workers received verylittle for their efforts, the director of the artel, brother ofthe new Cultural Restoration Council head, received anew snowmobile. This failure to pay the workers andthe new snowmobile was bannered in the localpapers as a sign of corruption or at least greed, andwith considerable innuendo, the Council head wasblamed (Kravchuk 1992). There were hard feelingsin the village, but the bad press was worse. The news-paper coverage posed restoration as a ruse, a meansby which one Itelmen family could acquire access toresources and this slant proved a deft move in inter-ethnic politicking. The articles were written as exposes,and supported and generated anti-restoration senti-ment and exacerbated divisions within the Itelmen com-munity.'*'Fondahl has written that similar reports de-scribing ethnically based mismanagement had beenpublished in a newspaper concerning an Even Nativeassociation with similar results (Fondahl 1995).

Despite the failure of the artel, some families lastedthere for a while. The most valiant effort in this earlyattempt was probably that of the son and daughter-in-law of a revitalization activist. They built a home inSopochnoe and with two young children moved fromKovran to live there on a full-time, and potentially per-manent basis. The difficulties were tremendous. It

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was not simply that there was no electricity, radio orother conveniences of village life. Sopochnoe is over100 kilometers—a minimum four days walk—from thenearest village. Though most food, building materialsand firewood could be obtained in the area, any othernecessities had to be hauled and planned for well inadvance. It was particularly hard on the mother of thehousehold, who, for the children, felt the necessity ofmaintaining a home on roughly a village standard ofliving. After almost a year, and with relatively few re-grets, they gave up and moved back to Kovran. Incomparison to the past, life in the village was too iso-lated. It was not a village with others on whom onemight depend for assistance and comradery (Fig. 71).And despite the existence of modern transport, therewas less interchange between the village site and otherplaces. The nearest neighboring village Moroshechnoewas also closed, meaning that the density of peoplein the area was so light that even with shorter traveltimes made possible by mechanized transport, thevalue of making the trip was too slight. Thus, all fami-lies eventually left.'^

For the purpose of this analysis, what is striking inthe story of this failed attempt to revive village life inSopochnoe is the Soviet nature of the original organi-zational plan. The villagers began by creating a workbrigade for the purpose of producing a certain amountof fish that would then be delivered to a centralizedprocessing unit. Instead of returning to the village withan understanding of living as they had in the past, theirreturn was predicated on industrially modeled produc-tion that, they thought, would allow them to survive intoday's world market. High hopes for the resettle-ment were dashed on the shoals of the commercialfisheries business.

Much greater success has been obtained in thereinhabiting of the area associated with another"closed" Itelmen village, Moroshechnoe, located sixtykilometers north of Sopochnoe (Fig. 72). Yuri [a pseud-onym] was born in the village of Sopochnoe and spokeRussian as his first language. At a very young age,

however, he moved with his family to Moroshechnoewhere the entire community was Itelmen speaking.The village then consisted of about nineteen house-holds strung along a sharp bend in the MoroshechnayaRiver, over fifty kilometers upstream from the Sea ofOkhotsk. Like Sopochnoe, Moroshechnoe has produceda number of people active in trying to revitalize Itelmencultural life in the 1990s. Yuri was not, however, par-ticularly active in this movement. He and his wife spentmost of their working lives in a central Kamchatkanvillage where they had moved to alleviate their youngson's extreme case of asthma. Yuri worked as a pro-fessional hunter, working mostly with Russian huntersfrom the area. During his years there he often dreamedof having his own hunting cabin in the woods, backwhere he had grown up. It was not, however, hisintention to try to rebuild his lost village.

His father had been a brigadier, in charge of thefishing brigade of Moroshechnoe's old kolkhoz "In-ternational." The fishing brigade worked at a fishingencampment twelve kilometers upstream from the vil-lage of Moroshechnoe itself. Yuri spent his summersthere, playing, working and swimming when youngand gradually taking on more responsibilities as he gotolder. Not long after he learned to write he took onthe job of recording the kolkho^s catch and eventu-ally keeping the fish camp's books. He became goodat math and was eventually offered the possibility tostudy in Moscow. One summer in the 1940s, how-ever, while they were stationed at the fishing site, hisfather became ill and died. This, of course, had a pro-found impact on the family, and each member, that is,all of Yuri's siblings, have told me about the sudden-ness of their father's death at this place (e.g., inPetrasheva and Koester 1997:10). One of the implica-tions was that Yuri decided to stay behind to workwith his family rather than go to the Russian West forfurther education.

Several years ago, during the winter, Yuri was hunt-ing with his son, Volodya, and they stopped their snow-mobiles near this fishing site. He recognized it as the

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place where they used to fish during the summer andthe place where his father had died. There is a smallspring there that never freezes over and it is thus agood source of fresh water; they decided to camp forthe night. During the night Yuri dreamt that his fathercame to him. When he awoke he remembered thenight's vision and decided that he would realize hislifetime dream and have his hunting cabin at thissite. With the help of the Cultural Restoration Coun-cil, he obtained rights to hunting territory in the vi-cinity and built a small cabin. As conditions wors-ened in his home village of Kovran, he and his familybegan to see the site as more than a hunting cabinand actually an economically viable refuge. Theybuilt another structure to be their home, convertedthe original cabin into a steam bathhouse {banya)and constructed a storage shed {ambar) and green-house as well. They now have a garden and anordinary outhouse in convenient proximity. The hunt-ing territory and the river make possible a reason-able living at the site. With three horses to take careof, they now have someone living there—Yuri or oneor more of his younger male descendants or relatives—all year. This is necessary both to take care of thehorses and garden and to prevent theft from the store-house and household.

In its fifth year (at the writing of this text) this rela-tive success story was in part made possible by theabysmal conditions in the village of Kovran. The lossof infrastructure there, including electricity, regular tele-phone service, pay for employment, etc. has meantthat life at an extremely isolated encampment, twodays walk from the nearest village, can be better thanin their home village. Socially this means that theinfrastructural relations founded on institutionalizedwage-labor and monetary consumption, collectiveactivity in the village clubhouse and home life thatwas increasingly centered around entertainment byelectronic media have, for this extended family, beenreplaced. Much stronger familial connections and tieshave reemerged through the use and sharing of local

natural resources. One of the connections that hasbeen "revitalized" with this return settlement is the tieto the place of predecessors; loss is being replaced byreconnection to a place where elder relatives had lived.For Yuri and all of his siblings it is very important thathe has come to live in this place where his father died.

In late July, 1994 I returned to Kovran from visitingmy friends at this settlement in Moroshechnoe. Kov-raners were of course curious about my impressionsbut their overwhelming reaction was to reminisceabout their own villages. I came across one group ofwomen standing on the stoop to their apartment build-ing. Each in turn reflected on her own former village.One asked me if I had been to her village of Belogolovoe(closed in 1 972), upstream from Moroschechnoe. Ihad and she looked up rapturously and said "Oh howI would like to see it again ... to go there." She askedif I thought it was beautiful. I said I thought it was.

Conclusion

In setting out to discuss the three different perspec-tives on life in lost villages that I have presented, it wasnot my initial intention to try to bring them all togetherwith a final unifying conclusion. It seemed to me suffi-cient to describe the sensibilities people have towardvillages long closed, toward the villages in which theylive, and toward villages in which they have tried onceagain to live. It has become clear to me, however, thatthere is a connection among these differing feelings ofloss and sensibilities of absence. The Itelmen peoplewith whom I have talked have articulated a strongsense of being connected to places through the pastand continuing inhabitance of elder kin and fellow vil-lagers in those places. Their feelings for villages andthe natural environs that surround them are intimatelytied to elder relatives and friends with whom theywalked, hunted, fished, gathered berries, sang, danced,loved and laughed. All three components—people, en-gaging in activities with those people, and the land-scape—are interlinked in creating social, material bondsto homelands. The connections were riven by the re-

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settlements in the 1950s and 1960s. As the Sovietgovernment encouraged and forced people to reori-ent their productive relations from kin and fellow vil-lagers to the kolkhoz, village and national (Soviet) ef-fort, one of the primary means by which villagers feltattachment to their natural surroundings as homelandwas pushed aside. Soviet forms of social life organizedon the basis of dedication to work and productivitydid not, however, come to replace these sentiments.The attachments have been maintained, rather, in boththe memories of elders and practiced in weekend out-ings by small family groups. Village restoration seemsto be succeeding on a small scale where ties to familyhistory have been realized (Figs. 73, 74).

I want to end with a song by Itelmen composerAnatoly Levkovsky, a lullaby for his son, that explainsall of these ideas of ties to people in places and of tiesto the land through the experience of living and pro-ducing in it with kin.

LullabySleep my son,sleep dear boy,

Lying comfortably on your cradleboard,

sleep gives strength.

Then you'll see, my boy,

you'll see your homeland

Where we were born along with you,

where you will live.

All our grandfathers and fathers

lived here from time immemorial,

Caught fish for food

and hunted sea animals.

And you, son, when you grow,

you'll learn these things.

You'll take this all in hand

and know how to use it.

Indeed, though our homeland is rich,

there are still limits to everything.

Your father will tell you where and how,

so that you can pass it on

for your grandchildren

Sleep quickly my son,

sleep quickly my dear boy

Lying comfortably on your cradleboard,

sleep gives strength.

(Levkovsky 1997)

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank the people of the villages ofKovran, Verkhne-Khairiuzovo and Ust-Khairiuzovo fortheir hospitality and kind assistance, and especially thepeople mentioned in this paper (pseudonymously andotherwise) and especially Elena D'iakonova, NinaTolmanand Ceorgi Zaporotsky. I would also like to thankViktoria Petrasheva for a long collaboration and kindfriendship and her Institute, the Pacific Ocean Divisionof the Department of Geography of the Russian Acad-emy of Sciences (formerly the Kamchatka Institute ofEcology and Nature Management), Robert Moiseev,Director.

Notes

1. This paper was written for the JesupExpedition's centennial conference in 1997. Sincethat time, numerous ethnographic accounts ofpost-Soviet life that report relevant comparableand contrasting experiences in the Russian Far Easthave appeared in print or been completed as dis-sertations. Because of space limitations I cannotexpand this paper to include reference to themall.

2. Referring to the destruction in people's livesthat took place, Petra Rethmann (1997) has notedthe euphemistic quality of this notion of merely"closing" villages.

3. The fieldwork on which this article is basedwas conducted primarily in the villages of Kovran,Verkhne-Khairiuzovo, Ust-Khairiuzovo and the cityof Petropavlovsk, with subsequent work in the

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villages of Tigil, Tilichiki, and short visits to otherplaces in Kamchatka.

4. The population of Kovran has declined overthe past decade from nearly 500 in 1993 to lessthan 400 in 2002.

5. Unless otherwise noted, the texts quoted hereare my translations from Russian.

6. Literally, the song says that the people ofKovran have "golden hands" {zolotye ruki) whichmeans more than just crafts, as I have translated.They can do what needs to be done to make aliving and do it well.

7. The terms "Itelmen" and "Kamchadal" are over-lapping ethnic designations for indigenouspeoples of Kamchatka. "Kamchadal" was the termused historically by Russians for the Native inhab-itants of Kamchatka. The term "Itelmen" was even-tually formally recognized by the Soviet govern-ment as the Native self-designation of thepeople(s) who occupied the central part ofKamchatka in 1927 (Murashko 1997:181)."Kamchadal" has gradually come to be used spe-cifically to mean indigenous Kamchatkans ofmixed Native and Russian (that is, Slavic Russian,including Cossack, Ukrainian, etc.) ancestry. Someof today's "Itelmen" are happy to be called"Kamchadal" and some "Kamchadals" from villageof Tigil and the city of Petropavlovsk find "Itelmen"acceptable. A detailed analysis of the history anduse of the terms can be found in: Murashko 1 996,1997.

8. The Itelmen khodlla is a kind of chanting song,usually mournful in tone, sometimes with meaning-less syllables in the place of lyrics. Communitieswere known to have their own particular styles (me-lodic and rhythmic). KhodilysNeie sung while alongtraveling, hunting, gathering and walking in thewoods or composed to be performed for others atgatherings. They often expressed the emotionalstate of the singer in relation to observations ofnature (there is an example in Steller 1996[1774]:234). The khodily (<p\.) I recorded in 1993-1996 sounded remarkably like khodily recorded byJochelson on the Ryabushinski Expedition in 1910.There are no more than four or five Itelmen today whostill know, and even fewer who perform, these songs.

9. Tatiana Evstropovna herself explained in Rus-sian the meaning of the poem to me from whichthe translation here.

10. Close ties to nature have often been notedas features of nostalgic remembrances in modernsociety (Frykman 1986; Burgos 1996) and wouldmake an interesting point of comparison moregenerally to remembrances of Soviet modernity(Creuziger 1 996).

11. Boris Chichio tells similarly of the devastat-ing affects of Asiatic Eskimo (Yupik) village clos-ings (Chichio 1 981).

12. Interpreting this period and these recollec-tions is also complicated by Russian idealizationsof childhood that pervade pedagogical and popu-lar literature and local understandings (Creuziger1996; Wachtel 1990).

1 3. An intensive dedication to work was charac-teristic of many of the public personas involved inthe development of the Soviet North. Writing in the1930s after travels through the Soviet Arctic RuthCruber described the energy of local party leaderswho in the pursuit of their duties regularly went withonly four hours' sleep per night (Cruber 1 939).

14. Since 1997 there has been improvement insome area and loss in others. Lack of fuel hascaused villagers to tear down uninhabited hous-ing to burn in their stoves. Electricity was restoredfor a time with the connecting of a high powerinter-tie from the village of Ust-Khairiuzovo, butthat quickly fell into disrepair. The most signifi-cant bright spot has been the phenomenal devel-opment and popularity of the village's dancetroupe Elvel. They have performed in Berlin, Paris,Moscow, San Francisco and numerous otherplaces as well as around much of Russia andKamchatka. Though they make relatively littlemoney for their performances, their travel andsmall income have had a significant economicimpact in the village as a whole.

15. "Sovet Vozrozhdeniia Itelmenskoi Kultury"{Council for Revival of the Itelmen Culture) wasfounded in 1 989. It was at the time a government-sanctioned organization. It has since become theprimary representative organization of the Itelmenpeople and is affiliated with the Russian Associa-tion of Indigenous Peoples of the North (RAIPON).

16. Fondahl has written that similar reports de-scribing ethnically based mismanagement had beenpublished in a newspaper concerning an Even na-tive association with similar results (Fondahl 1995).

1 7. Since that attempt however, with the house

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built, Klavdia N. Khaloimova has returned to thevillage site for extended periods and was onceaccompanied by her elder aunt, Tatiana P. Luka-shkina. Additionally, one man originally from thevillage, has taken up more or less year-round resi-dence alone, with visiting relatives to help out.

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81/King Island Impiat dancers perform in the Rotunda of the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History at theopening of the "Crossroads of Continents" exhibit, September 1988. Photographer, Jeffrey Tinsley

CURATORS, COLLECTORS, AND CONSUMERS

81/The Russian-American "Crossroads of Continents" exhibit team examines the Northwest Coast collections atthe Museum of Anthropology and Ethnography in St. Petersburg (then Leningrad), Russia. Left to right: WilliamSturtevant (Smithsonian Institution), an unidentified Russian curator, Sergei Serov (1940-1992, Institute of Eth-nography, Moscow), James VanStone (1925-2001, Field Museum), and Bill Holm (Burke Museum). Photographer,Jean-Loup Rousellot (ASC collection).

286

Meritage /\nthropologLj in the "Jesup-Z^^ ra:

Exploring [\|orth f acific (^uitures through (^ooper^^tive [Research

WILLIAM W. FITZHUCH

In the late 1970s the Smithsonian's National IVIuseumof Natural History and the Russian (then Soviet) Acad-emy of Science's Institute of Ethnography began dis-cussions that would lead to a new type of scholarlycollaboration between anthropologists and museumresearchers from the United States and the Soviet Union.This new approach followed decades of stagnantscholarly exchange and the first partially-successfulre-start of Russian-American cooperation pioneeredby field exchanges led by Alexei P. Okladnikov andWilliam S. Laughlin in the Aleutian Islands in 1974and in 1975 at Lake Baikal (Laughlin 1985). Focusedon the politically sensitive lands on either side of BeringStrait, these discussions sought to advance Soviet-American scholarship on and knowledge of culturesand history, not only of the Beringian area, but of thelarger relationships and cultural patterns of the entireGreater North Pacific Region (CNPR), the circum-NorthPacific Rim, extending from the Island of Hokkaido inAsia to the Columbia River in North America.

Although the years preceding our efforts of thelate 1970s had produced advances in anthropologi-cal knowledge of this region as a result of scholarlyexchanges sponsored by the International Researchand Exchange Board (IREX) (see Michael 1979; Michaeland VanStone 1983), political difficulties with accessto field opportunities and research collections requiredanother venue if cooperation was to continue. Thedecision to proceed with studies of museum collec-tions, whose trans-Beringian histories themselves re-quired collaborative Soviet, Canadian, and American

scholarship, eventually lead to a major exhibition.Crossroads of Continents: Cultures of Siberia andAlasl<a(1988-92), and a series of related publications. It alsooffered a plausible option for the political stalematethat had developed in the 1970s during this final phaseof the Cold War era over access for American research-ers to field locations in northeastern Siberia, and forSoviet researchers in North America.

In the twenty years that followed the birth of theCrossroads of Continents project, a number of institu-tional and international initiatives were undertaken thatprovided momentum toward the Jesup ExpeditionCentennial years of 1997-2002. In addition tostrengthening the exchange of information and re-searchers, and conducting joint projects of the sortpioneered by Franz Boas, these initiatives includedmuseum collection study, traveling exhibits, mediaprograms, and museum training. Perhaps even moreimportant than scholarly development and publiceducation needed for a strategically and economicallyimportant part of the world that was remarkablypoorly known, was the engagement of Nativepeoples themselves in the research and public pro-grams. By the end of the twentieth century it hadbecome clear that Native involvement at all levelsof the new cycle of research, collecting, archivingof cultural resources, and education was the essentialnew dimension of the jesup Centennial era.

Very early in the project we envisioned the Cross-roads of Continents exhibit and catalog as an effortto partially answer the scholarly need for the final

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"summary" volume of the Jesup Expedition publica-tion series—a volume that Boas and his colleaguesnever produced (cf. Fitzhugh and Crowell 1 988:1 5).The exhibit was also planned as a platform for anew cycle of comparative cultural studies and pub-lic programs that emerged from the Crossroadsproject to become the new Jesup 2 program an-nounced by the Arctic Studies Center in 1992 (Fitzhughand Krupnik 1993, 1994, 2001; Fitzhugh 1996). Inaddition to new research and publications, Jesup 2called for making museum ethnographic collectionsand other cultural resources more widely availablein Alaska (and, where possible, also in Siberia andthe Russian Far East). It also advocated promotingtraveling exhibits and Native participation in museum-based research and education through workshops andtraining programs.

The prospects and circumstances of Jesup 2 arevastly different from those originally proposed forthe original Jesup Expedition (or Jesup /) venture.The primary goal of theJNPE was to build museumcollections and conduct research on the origins andrelationships of North Pacific peoples and cultures.While these goals are still important, an additionaltarget for the next century must be the preserva-tion of and shared access to cultural and linguisticheritage. As in the Jesup-era, museums must have aprominent role in this work, and values other thanstrictly academic ones must be promoted. It is forthis reason that the focus of this paper is the pastand future role of museums as trustees of the NorthPacific heritage and cultural legacies. Museums whoseroles have been confined previously to research andbeing trustees of cultural treasures must also becomepro-active agents in the re-connection of "lost culturaltreasures" with Native peoples in their homelands.

The Jesup North Pacific Expedition

The century since the Jesup North Pacific Expedition(1897-2002) has seen profound change to the cul-tures and peoples of the North Pacific region. On both

sides of Bering Strait political, economic, and techno-logical change has transformed Native lives, broughtmassive influxes of outsiders into previously autono-mous ethnic territories, and imposed alien national struc-tures on a diverse group of traditional societies. By themiddle of the twentieth century, schools, hospitals,industrialization, militarism, and new ideologies had af-fected every Native person along the North Pacific Rim,from the Columbia River to Bering Strait to Hokkaido.

North Pacific peoples had much to lose in thisencounter, which arrived in an overwhelming on-slaught. On the Asian side. Native groups had been incontact with Europeans, directly or indirectly, sincethe early 1600s and with complex East Asian soci-eties for many hundreds of years earlier. On theAmerican side, contact with Europeans beganabruptly in the mid-eighteenth century. Yet by 1900,peoples in both regions had undergone massivetransformations that reached into almost every aspectof their cultures, from technology to ideology.

The discovery of these cultures and rich new landsamazed early explorers and propelled naturalists andanthropologists to seek answers about the origins andrelationships between Alaskan and Siberian animalsand peoples. The idea of studying Beringian relation-ships was not new to natural science. Biologists hadexpressed interest in the similarities and differencesbetween American and Asian biota, and these ques-tions had been a principal stimulus of the surveysorganized by the Smithsonian's Spencer Baird innorthwestern Canada and Alaska between 1857 and1887 (Rivinus and Youssef 1992:81-97). Boas' para-digm of cross-field regional survey and synthesismarked a major advance over the descriptive sci-ence that had characterized research in this areapreviously (Fitzhugh 1982, 1994; Krupnik andVakhtin, this volume). Although JNPE results failed toattain the theoretical goals of Boas' grand design, itproduced masses of information about a crucial, pre-viously unknown region, and its museum collectionswere a priceless benchmark and treasure-house for un-

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derstanding GNPR cultures and heritage.

The Boasian paradigm laid the foundation for thedevelopment of anthropological science in NorthAmerica and remains important today. Implicit wasthe belief that cultures could be understood by trainedobservers, and that their components (ethnology,language, archaeology, folklore, and human biology),separately and together, could be analyzed to pro-duce an objective representation of cultures, history,and relationships. Although this view is still seen as thebasis for much modern anthropology, post-modernistanthropology views this paradigm as partly flawedby Western-observer bias and adherence to a unifiedtheory of culture. Today's anthropology, while anchoredin empirical science, has been strengthened by multi-dimensional theory. Native science, and participationof indigenous peoples.

Boas and the Post-Jesup Research Agenda

The scholarly output of the JNPE appeared as a se-ries of volumes and research papers for over fourdecades between 1898-1940 (see reviews in Krupnikand Fitzhugh 2001; Krupnik 1 998, 2001). The princi-pal and most substantive results were descriptive eth-nographies and linguistic works. These volumes soonbecame the primary research documents on the cul-tures they described. For the non-Russian readingscholars of many Native Siberian groups they re-mained the only detailed scientific reports availableon these peoples throughout most of the twenti-eth century. Even in North America, the reports pro-duced under the Jesup Expedition banner by Boas,Teit, Swanton, and others remain the primary eth-nographies for these Northwest Coast groups to thisday. However, when one examines the origins of theJNPE venture, one confronts a clear disconnect betweenthe theoretical problem focus of Boas'JNPE plan andits scholarly antecedents. The questions of trans-Beringian origins and relationships raised by Boas

were not to be found in the descriptive earlier worksof the 1800s, such as that of Veniaminov, Zagoskin,

and Edward Nelson in Alaska, and they are barelydetectable in the less anthropological but neverthe-less significant monographs by Krasheninnikov, Steller,and other naturalists and explorers of Siberia of the1 700s. While this is not the place for a detailed cri-tique of the Jesup Expedition's accomplishments, itis worth noting that the genius of the Jesup programwas in its conception as a research plan, in its detailedethnography, and in its field collecting program, asreported elsewhere in this volume.

However, as an anthropological synthesis, JNPE alsohad serious shortcomings. For instance, by neglectingto incorporate results from the extensive earlier orcontemporary research in Alaska that was con-ducted by Edward W. Nelson, Lucien Turner, GeorgeT. Emmons, John Murdoch, and others working for theSmithsonian, the cursory and relatively unsubstantiatedattempts made by Boas to synthesize JesupExpedition's results (Boas 1903, 1905, 1933) producedsome glaring deficiencies. The most prominent wasthe re-affirmation of Boas' earlier pre-Jesup idea thatEskimo had been late arrivals on the North Pacificcultural scene from the Central Canadian Arctic (theso-called "Eskimo wedge" hypothesis - see Dumond,this volume).

Even though Boas and his collaborators failed tofulfill the interpretive potential of their project, the re-sults of the JNPE stimulated further research on the NorthPacific Native cultures and had a huge positive effecton the development of the twin fields of "Eskimology"and circumpolar studies. Throughout most of thetwentieth century anthropologists and folkloristsused JNPE data for studies of North Pacific, circumpo-lar, and hemispheric culture relationships. "Jesup cul-tures" were an important source of data for Hatt's (1914)studies of circumpolar clothing styles. Folklorists suchas Hallowell (1926), Hatt (1949), and others utilizedJNPE data for studies of comparative religion, mythol-ogy, and folklore. Jesup Expedition experiences andpersonal contacts encouraged Waldemar Jochelson toundertake later field research in the Aleutian Islands

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and Kamchatka Oochelson 1925,1928,1933). It ledanother Jesup team-member, Waldemar Bogoras(1929) to write an important paper on circumpolarculture theory; and it led eventually to studies such asSergei V. Ivanov's (1954) on Siberian representationalart and Tamara Mitlyanskaya's (1996) on Chukchifolk art traditions.

From the archaeological perspective, it triggered ahost of comparative archaeological work (Quimby1947; de Laguna 1 932, 1940) on Beringian prehistory,culminating with Leroi-Courhan's (1946) ambitiousstudy of North Pacific technology. The latter attemptedto advance JNPE historical goals by a synthesis ofethnographic and archaeological evidence but onlysucceeded in demonstrating the inadequacy of un-controlled archaeological data. During this period moreproductive results in archaeology were being madeby Collins (1937), Cjessing (1944), Spaulding (1946),Heizer (1956), Rudenko (1947/1961), Arutiunov andSergeev (1969, 1975), and others who used detailedexcavation techniques. It was here that real progresson the goals of Jesup Expedition were achieved, eventhough the results were painfully slow, due in part tothe nature of archaeological research but primarilybecause of increasing political differences.

Fortunately, the other major legacy of the JNPE, thecollections of objects, photographs, sound recordings,and ethnographic notes of the expedition, were beingcarefully maintained, primarily by the American Museumof Natural History in New York. Smaller "duplicate" col-lections of the materials that were gathered byJochelson and Borogas were also shared with the Mu-seum of Anthropology and Ethnology (MAE) in St.Petersburg, which already had a North Pacific collec-tion of its own, with special strength in Russian America.

Exhibiting North Pacific Cultures

In Paris, Berlin, and Copenhagen, North Pacific eth-nographic materials had been displayed to the publicfor nearly two hundred years prior to the JNPE, but theresources were thin and documentation was poor.

More substantial North Pacific collections existed inSt. Petersburg at the MAE (Dzeniskevich andPavlinskaya 1 988). Among these were the collectionsfrom Russian America made by Lavrentii Zagoskin andll'ia Voznesenskii in the mid-1 800s. The latter was ofspecial value because a museum scientist who wasattentive to careful documentation secured it. Arcticcultures had been displayed at the Smithsonian sincethe 1870s; but it was not until the 1890s that theybegan to be presented in depth (Fitzhugh 1997).The American Museum of Natural History (AMNH) inNew York had few Northwest Coast or Alaskan col-lections and no large Siberian materials before 1 890.The arrival of huge JNPE collections gave the Ameri-can Museum a truly comprehensive resource for ex-hibiting North Pacific cultures (Kendall et al. 1997).

Unfortunately, like Boas' JNPE science plan, theJesup Expedition collections never found a compre-hensive exhibit outlet at the American Museum. Boasoversaw the installation of his famous "NorthwestCoast Hall," but he and his successors never at-tempted to produce the exhibit of North Pacificpeoples that should have been the logical outcomeof the AMNH-financed JNPE program. The AMNHexhibition program remained locked into the schemaof museum science that called for cultures to bedisplayed in their traditional hemispheric blocks: theChukchi and Koryak were "Asian" peoples and weretherefore exhibited with the Asian groups; while theEskimo and Northwest Coast Indians were matchedwith other North American groups even though, inmany ways, they were more 'Asian' than 'Ameri-can.' Despite Boas' interest in trans-Beringian com-parisons, Bering Strait remained the dividing pointrather than the hinge for cultures of Asia and theAmericas, conforming to the pre-existing geographi-cally-based classification system of anthropologicalmuseums. Of course. Boas' departure from the Ameri-can Museum in 1905 to take a position at ColumbiaUniversity made his contribution to these matters mootat best.

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Science, Natives, and the American Public

Throughout most of the twentieth century, museumscience followed the Boasian tradition. As personneland financial support grew, Russian and North Ameri-can researchers returned to the unfinished work of theJNPE, attempting to clarify the history of North Pacificcultures through archaeological, linguistic, andethnohistorical studies. In this effort Native peoplesbecame informants, field team-members, guides andnavigators, and in a few cases joined the ranks ofresearchers or curators. During this period a cultureof academic and museum science prevailed in north-ern research that divided Native communities in Sibe-ria and North America from pursuit of cultural researchin their own countries. Until the 1960s, scholars rarelyconsulted communities about research projects to beundertaken. Similarly, they rarely presented their resultsto local sponsors or made any special efforts todisseminate project materials among local audiencesin ways that made it possible for Native people tostudy or use anthropological data that was collectedby scientists. Research occurred mostly apart fromcommunity interests, and scientists rarely addressedlocal media and school or community meetings asvenues for outreach, information sharing, and com-munity participation.

In some cases alienation resulted from the grow-ing commercial trade in antiquities. Archaeologistswho had once purchased prize specimens from lo-cal collectors began to condemn "pot-hunting" andcommercial digging, even after Native claim settle-ments had given Native people legal title to theseresources. During the 1970s through 1990s, St.Lawrence Island became a prime location for thecommercial market in artifacts, but other locationsin the Beringian region also participated in the an-tiquities trade. Many sites were damaged or de-stroyed; those in Cambell, St Lawrence Island, wereso devastated that they eventually were removedfrom the U.S. National Register of Historic Sites. Socialdamage was also caused by drugs and alcohol that

came with the ivory and artifact trade. And with arelaxation of border control after 1990, digging forprofit became a new quasi-condoned economy inChukotka, and the lucrative Japanese and Euro-Ameri-can art market resulted in smuggling through Nomeand Cambell.

On the American side, the alienation of Native andnon-Native northerners was rooted in a long traditionof top-down government policy-making. Examplesabound: the BIA schooling system which denied Na-tive language and culture; Aleut removal from Aleu-tian homelands in World War II; the 'near miss' of a"peaceful" atomic blast at Cape Thompson near PointHope in northern Alaska in 1959 (O'Neil 1994); nucleardetonations on Amchitka Island in the late 1960s andearly 1970s; loss of lands and resources to state andfederal land-taking, etc. The passage of the AlaskaNative Claims Settlement Act (ANCSA) in 1971 pro-vided a measure of local control; but it was not untilthe 1980s and 1990s that legal mechanisms, govern-ment decentralization, and co-management strategiesbegan to turn the tide, and scholars adopted formalethical standards for social science research.

Culture offered one possible avenue for Native self-determination, but in anthropology and museum stud-ies the system continued to be strongly stackedagainst Native interests. In Alaska, the collection ofobjects that had begun during the period of earlyexploring expeditions accelerated rapidly whenSmithsonian Institution's naturalists began to take upresidence after 1867. By the 1880s European collec-tors like Adrian Holmberg and James Lowther (EarlLonsdale) were complaining that all of the choicematerial had already been collected and what re-mained was of poor quality and not fit for museums.The "rush" for the Northwest Coast collections has beenwell documented (Cole 1985). By 1900 most of theold objects from Alaska and the Northwest Coast wereno longer in Native hands but in museum collections inWashington, New York, Chicago, Victoria, or in Europe.But there were some notable exceptions. Reverend

W.W. FITZHUCH

Sheldon Jackson built a local collection of Alaskaartifacts during the decades after 1 900 in Sitka, anda good regional collection grew following the es-tablishment of the College (later, University of Alaska)in Fairbanks in the 1920s.

The situation was roughly similar in eastern Si-beria, where systematic collecting began a bit laterthan in Alaska, during the 1890s, when NikolaiCondatti made an excellent collection for the MAEfrom the Chukchi (Dzeniskevich and Pavlinskaya1988). Only in a few instances were regional collec-tions gathered and kept locally, for instance, byVladimir K. Arseniev in the 1910s, in Khabarovskand Vladivostok. However, most ethnographic andarchaeological objects were sent back west to sci-entific centers far from their home territories. It wasnot until the 1970s that local voices began to beheard calling for the retention or return of culturalproperties and the creation of local museums andculture centers. Of course, throughout much of thetwentieth century both in Siberia and northwesternNorth America it was not the loss of collectionsthat was the principal concern of Native peoples.Rather it was the loss of language, traditional reli-gion, and economic and political independence thatwas the more direct threat to the existence of eth-nic nationalities. In both cases these losses weredifferent and had different causes and effects.

Soviet Cultural Policy

Many of these problems also existed in the Soviet FarEast where, after the Russian Revolution in 1917,Native cultural policy was more codified (Slezkine 1994)than in the laissez-faire North American political andeconomic system. For the early Soviet social planners,which included Waldemar Bogoras, who became apowerful leader of the "Committee for the North," thepreservation of culture, which was believed to be anessential element of ethnic nationality, was a highpriority of the Socialist state. However, Native cul-ture was far more often condemned as "primitive"

and illiterate—something to be exploited and replacedby modern social progress. For instance, incentiveswere put in place to encourage vegetable farming inNative communities in the 1 930s and fox farming dur-ing the 1950s. Cultural education was taken on as asocialist task conducted through the so-called "RedYaranga" system [a traveling educational and politicalteam, using a Native skin-tent, yaranga, as its mobileheadquaters—ed.].

As the Soviet system transformed itself into a morerigid authoritarian regime. Native cultural heritage be-came a state-defined and state-managed commod-ity, and its roots in local societies were severed. SmallNative groups lost all hope of preserving their culturaltraditions (Arutiunov and Vasiliev 1994; Sokolova1994). Here, unlike in Alaska, language, culture, andhistory were offered in schools, but content wasplanned to support state-determined goals concern-ing the nature and content of new "socialist culture."Native dance companies were instructed to presenttraditional themes with formulaic Soviet music andchoreography; Native writers whose work expressedSoviet political goals were promoted, and Nativemythology was reduced to the quaint "fairy-tales"familiar in Russian literature.

Shamanism and other Native religions were offi-cially repressed, considered being as socially dan-gerous as private ownership of reindeer by big herd-owners (kulaks). But in marked contrast to the theo-retically "freer" political atmosphere in Alaska, whichwas, in fact, deadly to Native religious traditions;under the Soviet system, which was repressive toreligion in general, traditional Native religious be-liefs continued either underground or as a folk genre.Whereas Alaskan and Northwest Coast Native cul-ture and religion were actively stamped out by en-trepreneurial capitalism and the missionizing frenzyof the 1870s-90s in an effort to recast ethnicpeoples into a Euro-American mold, Siberian Native"culture" was elevated in an attempt to create Sovietnationalities out of some tribal groups. This stands as

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one of the defining distinctions between the two po-litical systems in their relations with their respectiveethnic populations.

Full Circle: CrossroadsAl the "Crossroads"

My personal journey to the Beringian crossroads be-gan in the mid-1970s, when my studies of culture his-tory and prehistoric human-environmental interactionsin Labrador broadened into cross-cultural work onnorthern maritime cultures. As organizer of a sympo-sium on "Prehistoric Maritime Adaptations of the Cir-cumpolar Zone" for the 9th International Congress ofAnthropological and Ethnological Sciences in Chicagoin 1973, and editor of the ensuing volume (Fitzhugh1975), I met some of the Russian archaeologists work-ing in the North Pacific, including Sergei Arutiunov, ValeriiAlexeev, and Ruslan Vasil'evskii, as well as many Ameri-can scholars working in Alaska, including Don Dumond,Christy Turner, Robert Ackerman, Allen McCartney, andothers. Shortly afterwards, as Arctic curator at the Na-tional Museum of Natural History, I became intriguedby the potential of the Smithsonian's large, under-uti-lized Arctic ethnographic collections for research andpublic education. Working with Susan Kaplan, then ona post-doctoral position at the Smithsonian, I exploredthe phenomenal collections from Western Alaska ac-quired by Edward W. Nelson in 1877-81. This resultedin our joint exhibit and catalog, Inua: Spirit World of tineBering Sea Es/c/mo (Fitzhugh and Kaplan 1982), for whichRon Senungetuk, an liiupiat artist from Wales, Alaska,provided assistance. Later, to reach the rural audiencein Alaska, I also assembled a smaller ('mini-lnua') travel-ing version which traveled to villages in Alaska, Canada,and Greenland in 1983-87 (Fitzhugh and Kaplan 1983).Susan Rowley later organized an USIA-sponsored ver-sion of this exhibit ('Euro-lnua') which toured to Easternand Northern Europe in 1988. The experience with theseprojects revealed a strong and growing interest amongAlaskans to be reconnected with their "lost heritage"that had been squirreled away in the Smithsonian'sattic for more than a century. It was obvious that more

was needed than simply re-issuing modern reprints ofEdward Nelson's and John Murdoch's old ethnogra-phies (Nelson 1983; Murdoch 1988); Native communi-ties were looking for a more palpable connection withthe material and archival remains of their ancestors.

An opportunity to expand this program of 'heri-tage re-connection' appeared most unexpectedly whenWilliam C. Sturtevant and I began to take part in cul-tural exchanges between American and Russian an-thropologists being organized by the InternationalResearch and Exchanges Board (IREX) during the1 970s. Initially these exchanges had been planned tofamiliarize scholars with research data resulting from ageneration of anthropological studies on both sidesof Bering Strait. Some of these projects had producedrevolutionary results, especially in archaeology(Arutiunov and Sergeev 1969, 1975; Collins 1937,1951; Larsen and Rainey 1948; Ciddings 1967;Rudenko 1961). Intense interest also existed in areasof physical anthropology, linguistics, ethnology, andfolklore. After a few years during which several sym-posia were arranged by IREX (Michael 1979; Michaeland VanStone 1983), frustration had begun to growdue to the lack of progress on the one goal that eludedresearchers from both sides: inability to gain permis-sion to visit field sites and Native-populated regionsacross what had by this time become a heavily milita-rized frontier. The only positive results had been a se-ries of exchanges led by A. P. Okladnikov and W. S.Laughlin that unfortunately were extremely limited inscope (Laughlin 1985).

In 1978 the author and William C. Sturtevant pro-posed a new approach to the late Julian Bromley, thenDirector of the Soviet Institute of Ethnography. Whynot develop, we suggested to the Russians, a type ofBeringia-focused collaboration that would not be sopolitically sensitive? Such a program might fosterjoint studies of ethnographic and cultural materialsthat would have institutional goals that were broaderthan the scholarly objectives of individual anthropolo-gists. Why not design and produce a major joint

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Soviet-American museum exhibition featuring tradi-tional cultures of the Native peoples on both sides ofthe North Pacific? Such a study would incorporate theinterests of Soviet and American scholars in gainingaccess to previously unstudied collections with a spe-cific, highly visible outcome. The Russians, who werethen eager for travel and research opportunities in NorthAmerica, could study the early collections of Siberianpeoples gathered by the Jesup Expedition and housedin the American Museum of Natural History in NewYork. The Americans, in return, could gain experiencewith Soviet anthropology and study the large collec-tions of Alaskan and Russian-American objects thatdated several decades earlier than any other system-atic collections available from these regions in West-ern museums. After the many deadlocked disputes overfield access, the Russians found this idea a most wel-come shift of focus.

For the next nine years (1978-87), teams of Sovietand American scholars met periodically under theauspices of IREX to plan a project that in the bestmeaning of cultural exchange accomplished muchmore than create an exhibition. In reality, "Crossroadsof Continents" proved to be an effective research andeducation venture that served as an ideal bridge dur-ing the difficult transitional period in Soviet Americanrelations in the last phase of the Cold War, from thelate 1970s to 1990. In addition to providing for thecontinuation of scholarly exchanges, it highlighted theachievements and shared history of Native cultures inportions of North America and Eurasia that had beenengaged in contacts and exchanges for thousands ofyears, beginning with the peopling of the New World.It also happened that the project content had ahighly symbolic political message as our respectivecountries were groping toward rapprochement.

For this reason, although we were careful to keepthe exhibition from straying into dangerous politicalwaters, the planning of the exhibition nevertheless wasa political process, including the acceptance of itstitle. From the North American side, Americans and

Canadians immediately accepted "Crossroads" as thecentral theme. On the Soviet side, however, therewas some concern that the use of a title that im-plied open borders until the twentieth century wouldonly accentuate the darker realities of the Sovietperiod.

A further concern of Soviet officialdom was thedesire of American and Canadian curators to includethe Ainu people of Sakhalin, the Kuriles, and Hokkaidoto the list of Native cultures of the North Pacific to beexhibited. Yes, all parties agreed that the Ainu were tobe considered as culturally affiliated to North Pacificindigenous peoples; nevertheless the Russian siderefused to condone their inclusion as this wouldlead to "political problems" connected with theSoviet expulsion of the Ainu from Sakhalin in 1946and the taking of the southern Kurile Islands fromjapan in 1945. As the Soviet side expressed it, theAinu were "barely touched" by the Jesup Expedition,and since the JNPE had become the historical bedrockfor Crossroads, it was not appropriate to include theAinu. Faced with adamant opposition, we retreated,realizing also that our officially bilateral project, thoughoperationally trilateral due to Canadian collaboration,could not accommodate further organizational com-plexity with the inclusion of Japanese partners. As ithappened, we were able to fill the cultural gap in ourcoverage of North Pacific peoples in "Crossroads"several years later by organizing a special Ainu ex-hibition and catalog (Fitzhugh and Dubreuil 1999).

With these hurdles crossed, in 1979 WilliamSturtevant and I prepared a proposal that outlined theexhibition project and themes. Initially, the plan wasreceived positively by the Russian Academy of Sci-ence, but in 1980, discussions broke off for a yearduring the period of the Soviet invasion of Afghani-stan. New proposals were submitted in 1981 and inthe fall of 1982 a delegation of ethnologists from theInstitute of Ethnography including Sergei Arutiunov,Vladimir Vasil'ev, and llya Curvich came to inspect Si-berian collections at the Smithsonian and the Jesup

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Expedition collections and archives at the AmericanMuseum of Natural History. This was followed in 1983by a reciprocal visit of North American curators includ-ing William Sturtevant, Bill Holm, George and JoanMacDonald, William Fitzhugh, and James VanStone (Figs.81,82, and 87), to study collections in Moscow andLeningrad. It was at this time that GeorgeMacDonald, then Director of the Canadian Museumof Civilization in Ottawa, suggested we title the exhi-bition "Crossroads of Continents."

The Russian team made two more visits to theStates in 1984 and during the second meeting inDecember 1984 made a careful evaluation of theAMNH Siberian collections. This institution turned outto be steadfast partner as these exchanges unfolded.The legacy of thejesup Expedition could not have beenmore unstintingly fulfilled by the AMNH administration,curators, collections, and archival staff (and eventually,their exhibition and educational programs) as we be-gan the hard work of resurrecting the Jesup collectionsfrom storage and presenting them for research and tothe public'

During the Crossroads project these exchanges,on both sides, were funded for the duration of theproject by IREX and were managed by Dr. Wesley Fisherand his staff. We also began to receive grants from theSmithsonian's Special Exhibition Fund and in 1986 aformal protocol agreement was signed by both sidesthat stipulated that the Smithsonian's National Museumof Natural History would mount the show and theSmithsonian's Traveling Exhibition Service (SITES) wouldtravel it to five venues in North America. April 1986found the exhibition team and conservator VeraEspinola in the Soviet Union to make the final selec-tions of objects, all of which were to come from thecollections at the Museum of Anthropology and Eth-nography (Kunstkamera) in Leningrad, then the partof the Academy of Sciences' Institute of Ethnogra-phy structure. Aron Crowell and Valerie ChaussonnetJoined the American curatorial team, and the lateRussian Americanist, Sergei Serov (1940-92), was

designated Crossroads project coordinator for theSoviet side (Fig. 86). Sergei Arutiunov and I werethe respective project directors for the Soviet andNorth American teams.

In the fall of 1986 the Soviet group returned to theUnited States to make the selection of objects fromthe Siberian collections at AMNH. The final hurdle insecuring Soviet permission so that their artifacts couldcome to North America was a serious disagreementthat developed over the issue of reciprocity. Duringthe project's development it had always been un-derstood that the exhibit would be produced inWashington and after the North American tour wouldtravel to the Soviet Union. However, at the last minuteSoviet authorities disavowed this understanding anddeclared that there could be no Soviet tour becausethe Russian Ministry of Culture, whose museums werethe only possible sites for exhibiting Crossroads, hadnot participated in the project's development, andresented the opportunities garnered by the RussianAcademy of Sciences in this process. At the lastminute, in mid-1987 the impasse was bridged by high-level American diplomacy with the-then Soviet chiefleader Mikhail Gorbachev, that required the SovietMinistry of Culture and Russian Academy of Sciencesto come to an agreement on budgets, space, andscholarly travel. With these hurdles cleared—at leaston paper—the production of a catalog began, theMAE collections were sent to the Smithsonian, andplans were made for a major scholarly symposium totake place at the time of the opening.

Crossroads of Continents: Cultures of Siberia andAlaska opened on September 18th, 1988, at theSmithsonian's National Museum of Natural History inWashington, DC (Fig. 80). Emphasizing cultural di-versity but also featuring historical trends and com-parisons, the exhibition succeeded in demonstratingthe long history and complex developments acrossthis continental divide. It educated North Americansabout the Native peoples of a part of the world thatwas hardly known to them, and it demonstrated

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both the shared history of its peoples and the need forscientific collaboration in its modern anthropologicalstudy. It also conveyed the message that the politicalbarriers that had been erected at Bering Strait duringthe twentieth century were anomalous in the longerhistory of cultural contacts across this crossroads re-gion. After the Smithsonian venue, the exhibition trav-eled for four years to the American Museum of NaturalHistory in New York City, the Seattle Center, the An-chorage Museum of History and Art, the Eideljorg Mu-seum in Indianapolis, the Roy Rogers Museum in LosAngeles, and the Canadian Museum of Civilization inOttawa, ending in 1992 (Fig. 85). Hundreds of thou-sands of visitors saw the exhibition, and more than100,000 catalogs were distributed.

During the course of the tour, a large number ofRussian scholars visited the United States and Canadawhere they lectured, instructed docents, and conductedresearch. Many of these venues organized scholarlysymposia, which were attended by Russians and Ameri-can scientists. Although the exhibit had been devel-oped primarily by ethnologists from the Institute ofEthnography's Moscow headquarters, a number of cura-tors from the venerable Museum of Anthropologyand Ethnology (Peter the Great Museum, orKunstkamera) in St. Petersburg were able to visitNorth America. Many Americans met the first Rus-sians they ever knew through these exchanges andformed new impressions about Russians that werequite different from the image of the Cold War Sovi-ets derived from the American Government andmedia.

"Big" ("Bolshof) Crossroads was a product of thecentral institutes and museums, and their scholarsand curators. Sergei Arutiunov and Sergei Serov (Fig.86) from the Institute of Ethnography directed theSoviet component from Moscow. The St. Petersburg(then Leningrad) MAE supplied collections but tooka smaller role in planning although its curators par-ticipated in the catalog and the North American tour.For many unfortunate reasons (timing, place, poli-

tics, etc.), Native participation in the curatorial workand exchanges on both sides was almost nil.

When the Soviet system collapsed in 1991-2, ourplan for a reciprocal tour in Russia met the same fateas the Soviet government. The administration of theInstitute of Ethnography and its parent Academy ofSciences had no financial resources for supporting thetour, especially given the uncooperative attitude ofthe Ministry of Culture. Not having benefited from theplanning phase and the U.S. tour, the new Russian Min-istry of Culture (the heir of the former Soviet Ministry)had no interest in providing an internal platform in Rus-sia for an exhibit organized by a bureaucratic rival, theAcademy of Sciences. Corporate sponsors were no-where to be found, and costs of transport and secu-rity within the new Russia had become prohibitive.SITES and the Smithsonian concluded that the exhibi-tion could not be sent to Russia. IREX was unwilling tohonor the agreements we had signed with the oldSoviet authorities, and the reciprocal opportunities forresearch and scholarly exchange that Americans hadhoped to reap from the reciprocal tour of the exhibi-tion in Russia were irrevocably lost. Although this wasa painful development, most people agreed that thebenefits of the North American tour had been consid-erable and that much good had come from the exten-sive contacts with Russian scholars in America. Theproject officially ended in 1992 and the Russian ob-jects were shipped back to Russia after the exhibit'slast venue in Ottawa.

"Mim-Crossroaif^' in Alaska and Siberia

The collapse of the Russian tour made it impossible forus to gain national exposure for our joint efforts inRussia. But it did not diminish our interest in having the'Crossroads' message heard there, especially in theRussian Far East. Our previous experience touring asmall version of the Inua exhibit in Alaska during the1980s suggested that a "mini-Crossroads" exhibit mightalso be feasible in the Russian Far East. For this projectwe intended to rectify two glaring omissions of the

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"Big Crossroads" project: failure to involve Nativecollaborators and to have the show presented in localmuseums in Native North Pacific homelands.

Crossroads Siberia/Alaska (or 'Mini-Crossroads,'as we generally called this new project) waslaunched for the special purpose of presenting"Crossroads" themes of cultural interactions andmutual influences across the North Pacific to localaudiences in Alaska and the Russian Far East. Assuch, it carried forward the project begun by Boasand thejesup North Pacific Expedition, bringing jesupand subsequent results on North Pacific cultural heri-tage back to the peoples of this region. Unfortu-nately, the task of bringing Native people into thedialog about preservation, origins, and enhancementof their cultures had never been on the originalexpedition's agenda, framed as it was under theparadigms of "salvage museum anthropology" of thelate 1800s. In keeping with this declared goal of thenew project, several Alaskan scholars and Native cul-tural experts were invited to write sections of a newexhibit catalog featuring Alaska Native cultures (seeChaussonnet 1995). The list of contributors includedJana Harcharek from Barrow, Rachael Craig fromKotzebue, Larry Kairaiuak and Darlene Orr fromNome, Gordon Pullarand Richard Knechtfrom Kodiakand Anchorage, Barbara Svarny Carlson from theAleutians, Melinda Chase, Miranda Wright, and BerniceJoseph from interior Alaska, and Nora Marks Dauenhauerand Richard Dauenhauer from Juneau. In addition toobjects selected from the Smithsonian, we also chosecollections from local Alaskan museums. Incorporationof Russian Far East materials and curators was morecomplex and was accomplished by a tour of regionalmuseums in the Russian Far East during March of 1990,funded by the Smithsonian, the Alaska Humanities Fo-rum, and the Alaska State Council on the Arts. Theresearch team that visited the Russian Far East includedValerie Chaussonnet, William Fitzhugh, the late RichardJordan, James Dixon, Roger Powers, and Darlene Orr(Fitzhugh 1995:6-7; Fig. 89).

This amazing trip from the Bering Strait to Vla-divostok took place during a time of glasnost andperestroika during the last years of the old Soviet Unionand was organized by Valerii Shubin of the SakhalinRegional Museum in Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk. Much of itscost was borne by that institution and others alongour route. The tour gave us a first-hand look at regionalmuseums and their collections in Provideniya, Anadyr,Khabarovsk, Vladivostok, Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk, Novo-sibirsk, and Magadan. We were the first Western an-thropologists to visit some of these museums, andVladivostok was then still a closed city to outsiders.Typically, we met curators, cultural experts, and localofficials, but few Native people. We found every insti-tution willing to loan objects and expertise and willingto take part in the 'mini-Crossroads' Far Eastern tour.Valerii Shubin and his museum's Director, Vladislav M.Latyshev, offered to coordinate the planning and as-semble Siberian collections.

In the end, Provideniya, Anadyr, and Novosibirskwere unable to participate in the mini-Crossroads'project; but collections were assembled from localmuseums in Magadan, Petropavlovsk, Khabarovsk,Vladivostok, and Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk. Two years laterthe late Nikolai N. Dikov of the Magadan NortheastResearch Institute brought these materials to Alaska.,in his hand luggage, considering it prudent—indeed,'customary by Russian standards—not to inform U.S.Customs. The American collections were assembledfrom the University of Alaska Museum in Fairbanks, theKodiak Area Native Association in Kodiak, and theSmithsonian's National Museum of Natural History andNational Museum of the American Indian. The Smith-sonian, NSF, NEH, National Park Service, and other or-ganizations financed the traveling exhibition.

The exhibit was curated magnificently by ValerieChaussonnet in 1994 and toured to fifteen regionalmuseums and culture centers in Alaska under the guid-ance of local organizer Jean Flanagan Carlo between1994-6. These museums included almost every regionalcenter in Alaska, such as Barrow, Nome, Bethel, Sitka,

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Kodiak, Juneau, Fairbanks, Anchorage, Homer,Ketchikan, and others. A beautiful catalog was alsoissued (Chaussonnet 1995). The exhibit itself had a hugeimpact on Native Alaska. During various phases ofproduction and the Alaskan tour we hosted severalRussian colleagues in Washington and in Alaska.

The lessons of Crossroads Alaska were evident inthe tremendous response given to this exhibit as ittraveled from town to town in Alaska. In the decadesince the 'mini-lnua' tour of the 1980s we had learnedmore about how to package small traveling shows,especially about the need for curricula development,school tours, tours for children given by elders, educa-tion resource kits, and the importance of visual resourceslike photographic albums and videos. The energy of alocal tour coordinator was crucial for raising localand national funding for education components andfor local coordination. Terry Dickey, Wanda Chin, LeonardKammerling, and other staff of the University of AlaskaMuseum in Fairbanks assisted us masterfully in theseareas.

We also learned that small exhibits (if one can calltwenty-five large bright purple crates a small exhibitpackage!) could safely be shipped around Alaska inany season if the artifacts are selected for this task, arepermanently installed in climatically-buffered cases, andare given careful conservation monitoring). There is noreason why such traveling exhibits cannot safely bepresented in any place in the North. Given careful plan-ning, issues of object security can be met even underrigorous conditions of northern environments. Unfor-tunately we also discovered that touring small ex-hibits in this manner is also very expensive: Cross-roads Alaska/Siberia cost more than $500,000 toproduce and circulate in Alaska alone. Reports ofthis tour are found in various issues of the ArcticStudies Center Newsletter for the years 1994 to 1997.

With this experience in Alaska the Arctic StudiesCenter organized the next 'mini-Crossroads' tour—^thistime in the Russian Far East, in 1 996-7. This projectwas undertaken by Igor Krupnik, who began the

planning effort with the Russian Institute for the Cul-tural and Natural Heritage in Moscow through the gen-erous assistance of its Director, Yurii Vedenin, and As-sistance Director, Pavel Shulgin. However, following ahighly successful planning meeting of regional museumdirectors in early 1 997 in Khabarovsk, hosted by NikolaiRuban, Director of the Khabarovsk Regional Museum,the tour quickly became an Arctic Studies Center-Rus-sian Far East enterprise, with venues planned atKhabarovsk, Blagoveshchensk, Vladivostok, andYuzhno-Sakhalinsk. Krupnik directed the primary orga-nizing group with assistance from Deborah Hull-Walskiand Greta Hansen of the Smithsonian's Anthropologycollection staff, and the Arctic Studies Center's AnneStone. The primary collaborators on the Russian FarEast side included Nikolai Ruban (assisted by Dr. AnnaPonomareva, Khabarovsk Museum chief EthnographyCurator) and Vladislav Latyshev, Director of the Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk Regional Museum. Olga Shubina, of this lat-ter museum, took on the extremely important and dif-ficult role of Russian tour coordinator, and performedmiracles to ensure the safety of the collections.Thisproject, which to my knowledge was the first travel-ing exhibition to tour in the Russian Far East, quicklyrevealed the great potential as well as the pitfalls of aregional approach to exhibition sharing and museum-based education in this region. The problems weremany. Besides the obvious lack of funds, there was acritical shortage of Native participation and 'Nativevoice' in the Russian tour planning and in publiceducation and museum programs. A Native-basedcultural agenda was much less important in the localmuseums' agendas than appealing to the generalRussian public, and the exhibit was often presentedwith only token involvement of local Native culturalleaders, limited to the opening public ceremonies.Whereas our local Russian partners were not alwaysable to match the full scale of educational program-ming plan we had mounted in Alaska, the 'mini-Cross-roads' experience implanted models for future devel-opment of these concepts. Perhaps most importantly,

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the exhibition familiarized Russian museum curatorswith conservation requirements, installation technol-ogy, and educational programming that will be usefulin future efforts (Figs. 90, 91). Our Russian partners dida masterful job protecting and traveling the exhibitand, not the least, raising local funds for its transportand care. Other than the crucial payment of theexhibition's insurance bill by the Russian Ministry ofCulture, the entire tour was locally supported.

Our part, to get the exhibition cases and objectsto Russia and to get the North American collectionshome cost a mere $50,000! Igor Krupnik deservesgreat credit for editing the Russian language versionof the catalog (Krupnik 1996), for courting the supportof the Russian Ministry of Culture, for successfully ar-ranging for the catalog's printing by the United StatesInformation Agency, and for managing the entire tourprocess by phone and fax. Among Krupnik's contribu-tions was his success in securing Russian Native au-thors for the Russian language catalog, includingVladimir Etylen and Tatyana Achirgina-Arsyak fromAnadyr, Valentina Dedyk-lvkavav from Palana, TasyanTein from Magadan, Lyudmila Ainanafrom Provideniya,Anatoly Alexeev from Yakutsk, Nadezhda Laigun fromYuzhno-Sakhalinsk, Nadezhda Kimonko, Antonina Kile,Valentina Samar, and Valentina Fedorova-Diatala fromKhabarovsk and the Amur River region. This was thefirst time—at least, to my knowledge—that Nativepeople from both sides of the North Pacific were ableto present their respective cultures under one coverand with a similar format. Looking back one cantruly say that accomplishing the Russian Far Easttour was a minor miracle, to the great credit of OlgaShubina and her colleagues, Igor Krupnik, and theSmithsonian staff.

Siberian Museums and Native Peoples

In addition to its role in regional cultural education.Crossroads Alaska/Siberia provided curators from Si-beria and Alaska with opportunities to exchangevisits, meet Native groups, study collections, and

learn each others' museums. As mentioned above, theprocess started in 1990 when a team of Americancurators was able to visit several Russian Siberian mu-seums from Provideniya to Vladivostok to Novosibirsk.This trip gave us a glimpse of provincial Russianmuseums at an historic turning point in Soviet/Russianhistory, and we found them, like the rest of Russia atthat time, in the midst of self-examination and re-newal. Most of the old system and institutional ar-chitecture prevailed, but curators and directors weresearching for new directions. All were interested incollaborating with a traveling version of Crossroadseven though few people in these areas of Russiahad ever heard of the larger Crossroads show orseen its catalog.

Most important, the regional museum system atthat time was still part of the bigger cultural programof the Soviet State. Unlike Alaska and the NorthwestCoast, where museums functioned in more diverse, in-formal, entrepreneurial ways, Soviet regional museumsreceived state support and were seen as importanteducational institutions that purveyed state-sanctionedknowledge. Budgets were modest but assured, anddirectors and curators concentrated on collecting andarchiving cultural materials, conducting research, andproducing exhibits, local publications, and educationpamphlets. Regional museums always had three inter-nal departments with three corresponding exhibit sec-tions: natural science, pre-Soviet history, and Soviethistory. Since ethnography and archaeology werealways relegated to the "pre-Soviet" history. Nativeculture, as far as museums were concerned, officiallywas not a part of modern life or of its museum dis-plays. Russian Far East regional museums sponsoredsubstantial archaeological and ethnographic researchin their local areas and were often the designatedrepositories for these projects. Over time local Sibe-rian museums came to possess important researchcollections.

As progressive as this structure was compared tothe United States Government's seemingly dedicated

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aversion to cultural education, Soviet Native peoplewere rarely appointed to positions of authority inSoviet regional museums. During the Soviet era re-gional museums usually followed policies deter-mined by the local Communist Party line. Even dur-ing the Clasnost times, the situation we observedwas largely the same as that described for the pre-vious Soviet period in the Russian Far East. Museumshad opened exhibits on the atrocities of the old re-gime, but Native voices were almost non-existent, andexhibits of Native culture were exhibits of Native cul-ture rather than exhibits by or with Native people. Theseobservations of the 1990 tour may be now obsolete,as by the time Laurel Kendall and Alexia Bloch visitedsome of the same museums in 1998, local conditionshad changed markedly (Kendall and Bloch n.d.). Bud-gets were cut significantly and money was scarce ev-erywhere; but many programs were blooming withlocal support.

Overall, one might say that during the past cen-tury Native cultures maintained themselves atroughly comparable levels across the North PacificRegion. While North American Natives never experi-enced Stalin's murderous purges and police staterepression, they suffered greatly from official neglectand from loss of lands and subsistence resources.They found their cultures and languages ridiculedand repressed by the dominant majority, and in manyplaces they often occupied a comparable positionwith their Siberian counterparts at the bottom ofthe local economic and social ladder. Where SovietNative peoples had their cultures artificially controlledand were forced into Soviet modes of behavior, Ameri-can Natives had their cultures trampled by privateindustry and government, and lost much to disease,alcohol, and poverty, as also was the case in Siberia.

Thus, by 1990, Native cultures in the RussianFar East suffered both the continued repression of theSoviet past as well as the crushing weight of a strug-gling economy, in which local people were frequentlyimpoverished outsiders. Unfortunately, Soviet museum

policy did nothing to help Native people maintaintheir culture anymore than the government helpedthem maintain a voice in local affairs. By this time inAlaska, cultural programming and revitalization hadsurged forward during the twenty years since theAlaska Native Claims Settlement Act had openedthe way toward more intensive resource develop-ment and Native "corporate" independence. Al-though Native Alaskan cultural life and its museumexpressions then, as today, was far from being a"bed of roses," significant strides had been made inself-determination and economic independence.Fortunately, there are indications that the situationin Siberia is now also improving for its Native people,at least as far as the preservation and documenta-tion of their cultures is concerned.

Heritage Anthropology: Past and Future

Over the past twenty-five years, since the ArcticStudies Center began producing museum-based out-reach programs, the importance of reconnecting cul-tural heritage materials gathered and preserved inmuseums with ongoing living traditions has become asurprising new and revitalizing force in museum an-thropology. Institutions whose raison d'etre sincetheir founding more than one hundred years ago hadbeen to collect vanishing cultures and educate orentertain the public have had their missions deeplytransformed. Academic scholars and museum cura-tors have discovered that the world [out there] hasdimensions not conceived of by the founders whocharted anthropological and museum research for thepast century. The discovery that these collections couldbe useful for more than simply preserving the remainsof cultures being absorbed into the mainstream of so-ciety or for scientific studies of human history has beena surprising revelation to a field that has prided itselfon understanding and serving its constituents and itsaudience.

For years that audience has consisted of mu-seum visitors and other scholars who used museum

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collections and archival materials for generally altruis-tic goals of entertainment, appreciation, research, anderudition. Now, within the span of little more than adecade, a new pulsing vein of culture and tradition hasbecome evident, arising not in the sometimes dowdyhalls of museums and curators' stalls but in the recon-nection between museum objects and records andthe people from whom they originated. Somehow,most of the societies and cultures that had becomethe targets of salvage anthropology—at least, inthe North—have survived the twentieth century andhave emerged with a passion to re-invigorate theirheritage and to learn from or absorb parts of theirpast into their modern lives.

The history of anthropology and museum col-lecting in the North Pacific during the past centuryprovides a striking panorama of the forces that haveshaped cultural studies and the use of cultural ma-terials. Unlike most other areas of the world wherecomplex societies had already heavily impacted tra-ditional life, cultures of the North Pacific in the latenineteenth century were still largely intact. Here thepast 100 years of change has been paralleled by aremarkable record of anthropological and museum-based documentation. Few areas of the world areso well represented in terms of material cultural andhistorical records.

During the century since the Jesup Expedition teamssurveyed the North Pacific, anthropology and museumstudies have come full-circle, with Native peoplesemerging to reclaim their stake in their heritage and inthis process. This transition went through several stages:from the "salvage documentation" of the vestiges oftraditional cultures for purely historical and academicreasons (as practiced by Boas); to the "pro-activist eth-nography and cultural construction" by government-employed scholars of the early Soviet era (initiatedby Bogoras); to the purely scientific investigationsof cultural origins as practiced by scholars like HenryCollins, Frederica de Laguna, and Sergei Rudenko;to the more reflexive museum and publication

projects of the late 1 900s, like Inua: Spirit World of theBering Sea Eskimo, Crossroads of Continents and its'mini-Crossroads' versions. Chiefly Feasts: The Endur-ing KwakiutI Potlatch (Jonaitis 1991), The Living Tradi-tion of Yup'ik Masks: Agayuliyararput — Our Way ofMaking Prayers (Fienup-Riordan 1996), and LookingBoth Ways: l-ieritage and Identity of the Alutiiq People(Crowell, Steffian, and Pullar 2001). Today the peoplesof these regions, as elsewhere, are rediscovering theirpast and are finding materials that inspire their future.This is the real and lasting legacy of the Jesup Expedi-tion. The re-establishment of the connection betweenculture-bearers and their museum and archival heritageis emerging as a powerful new force that re-purposesmuseums and opens new responsibilities for curatorsand their new local constituencies.

Facing a paradigm shift that also includes the poli-tics of repatriation, museum workers need to reassesstheir goals and methods of operation. While the out-comes are not clear, new technologies, especially theInternet, imaging, and information technologies offerpowerful new tools for bringing museum treasures outof the archives and back into the mainstream of Na-tive life and to the many other audiences seeking en-richment with cultural heritage materials. Programs ofthis new era, like the evolving permutations of the"Crossroads of Continents" program, have helped re-chart the route and find new partners. The original JesupExpedition was instrumental in this effort, and I imag-ine Boas might not have been displeased to see theresults of this new kind of museum anthropology thatbrings collections and Native peoples together againacross Bering Strait after having drifted so far apartduring the intervening century.

Notes

1. As it turned out, AMNH support for Russianand Native Siberian researchers who were studyingthese collections was to extend many years intothe future, culminating in efforts that lead to theJesup Expedition Centennial conference of 1 997 andthis publication.

W.W. FITZHUCH

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1 998 Jesup Genealogy: Intellectual Partnership andRussian-American Cooperation in Arctic/North Pa-cific Anthropology. Part 1. From the Jesup Expedi-tion to the Cold War, 1897-1 948. Arctic Anthropol-ogy 35(2): 199-226.

2001 A Jesup Bibliography: Tracking the Publishedand Archival Legacy of the Jesup Expedition. In Gate-ways. Exploring the Legacy of the Jesup North PacificExpedition, 1897-1902. Igor Krupnik and William W.Fitzhugh, eds. Pp. 257-78. Contributions to Circum-polar Anthropology, 1. Washington, DC: Arctic Stud-ies Center.

Krupnik, Igor, ed.

1 996 Perekrestki kontinentov. Kul'tury korernnykhnarodov Dal'nego Vostoka i Aliaski (Crossroads ofContinets. Cultures of the Native Peoples of the

(Russian) Far East and Alaska). Valerie Chaussonnet,comp. Washington, DC: Arctic Studies Center.Krupnik, Igor, and William W. Fitzhugh, eds.

2001 Gateways. Exploring the Legacy of the JesupNorth Pacific Expedition, 1897-1902. ContributionstoCircumpolarAnthropology, 1 .Washington, DC: Arc-tic Studies Center.

Larsen, Helge, and Froelich Rainey

1 948 Ipiutak and the Arctic Whale Hunting Culture.Anthropological Papers of the American Museum ofNatural History, 42. New York.

Laughlin, William, S.

1985 Russian-American Bering Sea Relations: Re-search and Reciprocity. American Anthropologist87(4):775-92.

Leroi-Curhan, Andre

1 946 Archeologie du Pacifique-Nord. Materiaux pourI'etude des relations entre les peuples riverains d'Asieet d'Amerique. Travaux et Memoires de I'Institutd'Ethnologie, 42. Paris.

Michael, Henry P., ed.

1 979 A U.S.-U.S.S.R. Symposium on the Peopling ofthe New World. Arctic Anthropology 16(1).

Michael, Henry P., and James W. VanStone, eds.

1983 Cultures of the Bering Sea Region: Papers froman International Symposium. IREX: New York.

Mitlyanskaya, Tamara B.

1 996 Native Carvers and Outsider Artists: Patternsof Interaction in Siberian Eskimo/Chukchi Ivory Carv-ing. Arctic Anthropology 3 3(1):6 7-88.

Murdoch, John

1 988 Ethnological Results of the Point Barrow Ex-pedition. With Introduction and Appendices byWilliam W. Fitzhugh. Classics in Smithsonian An-thropology. Washington, DC: Smithsonian institu-tion Press.

Nelson, Edward W.

1 983 Eskimo about Bering Strait. With Introductionand Appendices by William W. Fitzhugh. Classics ofSmithsoninan Anthropology. Washington, DC:Smithsonian Institution Press.

O'Neil, Daniel

1 994 The Firecracker Boys. New York:St. Martin's Press.Ousley, Steven, and Richard Jantz

2001 500 Year Old Questions, 100 Year Old Data,Brand New Computers: Biological Data from the JesupExpedition and the Paradox of the "AmericanoidTheory." In Gateways. Exploring the Legacy of the jesupNorth Pacific Expedition, 1897-1902. Igor Krupnikand William W. Fitzhugh, eds. Pp. 257-78. Contribu-tions to Circumpolar Anthropology, 1 .Washington, DC:Arctic Studies Center.

Quimby, George

1 947 The Sadiron Lamp of Kamchatka as a Clue tothe Chronology of the Aleut. American Antiquity1 l(3):202-3.

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Rivinus, Edward F. and E. M. Youssef

1 992 Spencer Baird of the Smithsonian. Washington,

DC: Smithsonian Institution Press.Rudenko, Sergei I.

1947 Drevniaia kul'tura Beringova moria ieskimosskaia problema (Ancient Culture of the BeringSea Region and the Eskimo Problem). Moscow andLeningrad: Clavsevmorput'. (Translated English edi-tion of 1961).

Slezkine, Yuri

1 994 Arctic Mirrors. Russia and the Small Peoples ofthe North. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press.

Sokolova, Zoia P.

1 994 Recent Ethnic Processes among the People ofthe Russian Pacific Coast. In Anthropology of the NorthPacific Rim. William W. Fitzhugh and ValerieChaussonnet, eds. Pp. 347-55. Washington, DC:Smithsonian Institution Press.

Spaulding, Albert C.

1946 Northwestern Archaeology and GeneralTrends in Northern Forest Zones. In Man in North-eastern North America. F.Johnson, ed. Pp. 143-47.Robert S. Peabody Foundation for Archaeology,3. Andover.

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82/Jim VanStone's "method" for selecting ethnographic objects for the Crossroads of Continents exhibit—in thiscase, a Tlingit war helmet from the MAE collection. Museum of Anthropology and Ethnography (KunstWammer), St.Petersburg, Russia. 1983. Photographer, Jean-Loup Rousselot (ASC Collection)

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83/Aleut laborers working for the Jochelsons excavate the whalebone walls of an ancientAleut barabara at the Aglagax site on Umnak Island (NAA 2003-20969). From an albumpresented by Waldemar Jochelson to the Department of Anthropology of the National Mu-seum (also jochelson 1925:32)

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yA^ieut/\rcliaeoiogtj and (^Luitura! ["jeritage:

T"^^- L'Sgact) of the ^'esup f\|orth facific r'xpedition

STEPHEN LORING

AND DOUGLAS W. VELTRE

As the far-reaching goals of the Jesup North PacificExpedition ONPE) of 1897-1902 developed, their ini-tial scope narrowed to the extent that the researchventure had eventually only a marginal presence insouthwestern Alaska. Nevertheless, subsequent re-search in this area owes a considerable intellectual debtto the foundations laid by JNPE researchers and to itsoverall scholarly paradigm. In particular, WaldemarJochelson and Dina Jochelson-Brodsky, who have hadextensive Siberian experience and had worked withthe JNPE, brought the broad anthropological approachof the Jesup Expedition program to the Aleutians in1909-10 (Fig. 83).

In this paper, we first examine archaeologicalresearch in the Aleut region preceding that of theJochelsons. Next we discuss the specific efforts of theJochelsons, whose Aleut-Kamchatka Expedition of1909-11 addressed a number of themes that havefigured significantly in subsequent Aleutian research.These include the nature and timing of human coloni-zation of the region; the nature of human maritimeadaptations; and the cultural, linguistic and biologicalrelationships and continuities between the past andthe present. Third, we look at archaeological researchdone between that of the Jochelsons and about 1 970.Finally, we review work done since 1 970, in particularexploring the significant ways in which the contribu-tions of the Jochelsons and other early researchershave combined with recent legislative developmentsto influence contemporary archaeological and cultural

heritage efforts in the Aleut region and to help shapeAleut identity in the modern world.

The Aleut region is that area of southwestern Alaskathat was the traditional home of the Aleut people (aname which is discussed below). It includes the tip ofthe Alaska Peninsula from Port Moller westward, theShumagin Islands group south of the Alaska Peninsula,and the entire Aleutian Islands archipelago, someseventy islands extending 1,600 km from the end ofthe Alaska Peninsula westward towards the KamchatkaPeninsula (see map Fig. 5). This area comprises a dy-namic landscape shaped by glacial and tectonic pro-cesses, including volcanism, earthquake activity, andsea-level changes (McCartney and Veltre 1 999). Atthe junction of the North Pacific Ocean and the BeringSea, where marine upwelling provides nutrient-richwater, the Aleutian Islands ecosystem hosts one ofthe world's most productive fisheries and highest con-centrations of pelagic birds and marine mammals. Thebountiful marine resources available to human huntersand gatherers figured significantly in the early coloni-zation of the archipelago and continue to shape re-gional social, political, and economic agendas.

Archaeological, biological, and ethnographic datashow a cultural continuity in this region for at least thelast 4000 years (cf Laughlin 1963, 1980; McCartney1 977, 1 984). Aleut oral tradition also suggests thatthe Pribilof Islands, north of the Aleutian chain in theBering Sea, were known to the Aleut people prior tothe islands' discovery by the Russians in 1 786 and

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1 787. However, the limited archaeological researchto date there has found no evidence of utilization ofthese islands by anyone prior to the Russian period,when they were settled by the Aleut (Vettre and Veltre1986; Veltre and McCartney 1994, 2002).

At the time of contact in the mid-1 700s, the Aleutpopulation likely numbered some 1 2-1 5,000 (Lantis1984:163). The traditional economy was focused onthe sea as the provider of nearly all food and raw ma-terials, with marine mammals, ocean and anadromousfish, marine invertebrates, birds, and eggs providing atleast ninety-five percent of the diet (Laughlin 1980:49).Larger winter settlements and smaller seasonal campswere along the coast. Extended families, possibly or-ganized according to principles of matrilineal kinship(Lantis 1 970), lived in semi-subterranean houses.

In contemplating the legacy of the JNPE as it per-tains to the Aleut region, we focus our remarks on thehistory of archaeological research in the Aleutians,mentioning only briefly the wider sphere of anthropo-logical issues embraced by the Boasian school. Archae-ology in the Aleutians began in the 1 870s with thepioneering work of William Dall and Alphonse Pinart.Their revelations on the antiquity of Aleut occupationsstimulated interest in the Aleutians as a possible gate-way for people entering the New World and greatlyinfluenced Franz Boas' (1905:91) statement of thejesupExpedition goals: "one of the great problems of eth-nological science is the relation of the American raceto the races of the other continents" to be revealedthrough the comparative study of contemporary Na-tive people, physical anthropology, and archaeology.While in Boas' original conception of thejesup Expedi-tion research program the Aleutians were sched-uled for attention in 1901 (see Fig. 4, p.17), thatsurvey never materialized.

The Beginning of Archaeological Research inthe Aleutians

Anthropology and geography were the pre-eminentintellectual bases of eighteenth and nineteenth centu-

ries' expanding Western colonial enterprises. The dis-cipline of archaeology has, until recently, been apeculiar and exclusionary system of knowledge thathas served to extend Western intellectual hegemonyover the past and has, for the most part, failed tocapture the imagination and interest of people innorthern communities. Nevertheless, by extendingperceptions of the viability and existence of social(tribal, ethnic) institutions into the past, archaeol-ogy can play an important role in the preservation,formation, and interpretation of social identities. TheBoasian anthropologists were much closer in time tothe pre-contact past with their notions of traditional,static culture, and they expected archaeology to con-firm ancient land tenure and perceptions shaped byethnography. While Aleut community members havealways been involved in the interpretation of their past(as guides, interpreters, informants, field-workers), it isonly recently, as anthropologists have begun to sur-render their position of authority and control, that theyhave taken a more active role in the construction oftheir past.

Archaeology in the Aleutians arguably begins withthe collecting activities of the French ethnologistAlphonse Pinart who carted off a collection of remark-able wooden masks and associated objects from aburial cave on Unga Island in the Shumagins in 1 871(Pinart 1875). Knowledge of the Unga discoveriesquickly spread and piqued the interest of William Dall,captain of a U.S. Coast and Geodetic Survey vesselin charge of a Smithsonian-sponsored scientific sur-vey of the Aleutians from 1 871 to 1 874 (Dall 1 875a,1875b, 1878).

Dall was the epitome of a systematic naturalist.Trained by Louis Agassiz, he first came to Alaska in1 865 (when he was twenty-one) to work with andeventually lead the Western Union International Tele-graph Expedition (Merriam 1 927; Dall 1 870). Dall wasa splendid exemplar of the intellectual eclecticismof nineteenth century naturalists. While primarily aspecialist on shells, his Alaska research also included

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publications on birds, fish, mammals,cetacean parasites, and meteorology,□all's archaeological investigations, con-ducted sporadically as bad weather andlogistics constrained his official surveywork, pioneered the systematic excava-tion of shell middens (Dall 1873, 1877).His deep cuts in stratified midden depos-its suggested a significant antiquity of theregion.

In the Aleutians the question of theorigins of the Aleut people structuredearly research, with the possibility thatthe earliest colonizers crossed from Kam-chatka Peninsula to the Aleutian Islandsvia the Commander Islands. While Dall didnot believe in the Asian colonization ofthe Aleutians, the intense debate surround-ing the issue of the origin of humans inthe New World and their possible migra-tion routes figured significantly in Aleutianresearch prior to World War II.

There is an interesting aside to Dall'sresearch. In 1 872 he arranged to adopta fifteen-year old orphan from lliuliuk(present-day Unalaska), George Tsaroff(Fig. 84), who returned with Dall from Alaskain 1 873. Impressed byTsarofFs cleverness, Dall arrangedfor him to be educated at the University of Michigan.In 1 878, Tsaroff came to Washington as an "assistant"where he was placed in charge of the Smithsonian'sethnological hall. There he served as a guide to thecollections: "himself forming an extremely interestingexhibit—that of a native Indian, well educated and in-structed, and able to explain the special objects andapplications of many articles manufactured and usedin his own country" (Baird 1 881:69).

Tragically, Tsaroff contracted consumption anddied in 1 880. His tenure as a museum guide and living-link between ethnography and museum collections pre-cedes by twenty-three years the celebrated case of

Fig. 84/ George Tsaroff, soon after starting to work at the SmithsonianInstitution, ca. 1 878 (NAA-SI 80-1 3437)

Ishi, the "last" of the Yahi Indians, who was befriendedby Theodora and Alfred Kroeber and who performeda similar function at the University of California Mu-seum of Anthropology at Berkeley (Kroeber 1 961).

Initiated by Dall, anthropological interest by theSmithsonian in the Aleutians was furthered by thecollecting activities of Lucien M. Turner, an employeeof the U. S. Army Signal Service who was stationed inthe Aleutians in 1874-5 and again in 1879-81. Heestablished meteorological stations on Atka and AttuIslands. Continuing in the broad natural sciencecollecting tradition of Dall, Turner made large impor-tant collections of birds, fish, mammals, insects, andplants for the Smithsonian. His anthropological

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contributions included the acquisition of large ar-chaeological and ethnological collections and Aleutvocabularies (Baird 1 883). While Turner's collectionshave never been systematically analyzed or evendescribed, they form a very valuable legacy for theinsight they provide on Aleut culture in the WesternAleutians.

Another component of the Smithsonian interestin the Aleutians was the work of the pioneeringnaturalist Leonhard Stejneger (1 851-1 943), whoseresearch on the extinct fauna of the Aleutians, in-cluding Steller's sea-cow and Pallas' cormorant(Stejneger and Lucas 1 889), presaged interest in theconsequences of human hunting and foraging prac-tices on Aleutian ecosystems.

The Fieldwork of Waldemar Jochelson andDina Jochelson-Brodsky

In preparing for the work of the JNPE, Boas traveledto Europe in 1 898, where he was introduced toWaldemar Jochelson (Vakhtin 2001:80-2). Whilesomewhat of a political liability, Jochelson was anextraordinarily gifted and experienced Russian eth-nographer. He had worked with northern peoplesof Siberia while in exile (between 1886-95) and inresidence in Yakutsk (1895-7) prior to Joining theJesup Expedition research program. While on his JNPEassignment, Jochelson was accompanied by his wife,Dina Jochelson-Brodsky who had trained in medicineat the University of Zurich and who took responsibilityfor the expedition's health as well as for the acquisi-tion of anthropometric and biological data. DinaJochelson-Brodsky also produced a portion of thephotographic record of the expedition's travels in Si-beria. The Jochelsons were in Siberia from the summerof 1 900 through the summer of 1 902 working amongthe Koryak, Even (Tungus), Yukagir, and Sakha (Yakut)peoples (Boas 1 903:1 02-9; Jochelson 1908, 1926).Their collections were primarily ethnological but alsoincluded physical anthropology (plaster casts offaces and measurements), photography, folklore and

musical recordings, human skeletal remains and ar-chaeological materials acquired from graves and re-cently abandoned villages, zoological specimens (in-cluding a 220 lb mammoth tusk!), and meteorologicalobservations Oochelson, in Boas 1903:109).

The Jochelsons' experiences with the JNPE leddirectly to their involvement with the RyabushinskiAleut-Kamchatka Expedition of 1909-11, modeledclosely on the Jesup Expedition protocol (Jochelson1912). The Ryabushinski Expedition was under theauspices of the Imperial Russian Geographical Society(Fig. 92) and was financed by the Russian bankerFeodore P. Ryabushinski (Theodore Riabouschinsky). Itsought to pick up where the JNPE had left off in resolv-ing the historical, cultural, and biological relations amongAleut, Eskimo, and Asian peoples. Foremost in its re-search agenda was a determination of Aleut origins inwhich the role of archaeology featured prominently.The Jochelsons arrived in Unalaska injanuary 1909. Theyconducted archaeological investigations on Attu andAtka Islands during the following summer, and thenspent the next winter at Nikolski village on UmnakIsland conducting linguistic research and collecting pho-nographic recordings of traditional Aleut myths andstories Oochelson 1912; Bergsland and Dirks 1990;Korsun et al. 2001). In the spring of 1 91 0 they made abrief visit to the Pribilof Islands before returning toUnalaska and thence to Kamchatka, where they spenta year conducting archaeological excavationsOochelson 1928).

During their Aleutian fieldwork the Jochelsons wereassisted by Alexei M. Yachmenev, the "Aleut chief ofUnalaska," and other Aleut elders (making them thefirst to acknowledge the role of elders in the pro-duction of knowledge). Two volumes based on theAleutian fieldwork were forthcoming, one on the his-tory, ethnology, and anthropology Oochelson 1933),the other on the results of their archaeological re-search Oochelson 1 92 5). The Aleutian fieldwork, fol-lowing the broad Boasian agenda established by theJNPE researchers, included archaeological excavations,

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ethnological observations and collections, anthropo-metric measurements, and the collection of Aleut my-thology, oral traditions, language, and music (Figs. 93and 94).

Smithsonian Redux

For a decade beginning in the late 1920s, theSmithsonian's indomitable Ales Hrdlicka made annualarchaeological expeditions to Alaska. Hrdlicka was in-terested in the problems of racial history and origins,especially as they were applicable to finding theorigins of human occupation of the New World, theorigin of Eskimo cultures in Alaska, and the nature ofprehistoric exchange, interaction, and migration.Hrdlicka worked in the central and western Aleutiansduring three successive field seasons in 1936, 1937,and 1938 (Hrdlicka 1945). He dug at a number ofancient Aleut sites and conducted physical an-thropological and biometrical observations in Aleutcommunities, especially those in the Near Islands groupof the western Aleutian Islands and in the CommanderIslands in Soviet territory.

Due to his zeal for recovering human skeletal re-mains, Hrdlicka never had a very good reputationamong Native Alaskans. This research, regardless ofthe valid scientific questions the "data" sought toaddress, was conducted with little regard for Nativeconcerns (Loring and Prokopec 1994). His enthusi-asm also resulted in archaeological procedures thatwere far from satisfactory, even by the standards ofhis day. To his credit, however, Hrdlicka did retain muchof the faunal material exposed during his midden ex-cavations.

Research from World War II to 1970

The pioneering work of Dall, the broad-based JNPE-inspired investigations of the Jochelsons, and the ex-peditions of Hrdlicka were mostly undertaken withoutsubstantial Aleut involvement, except for the sig-nificant role of local people in sharing their culturalexpertise and providing oral recordings for the

S. LORING AND D. W. VELTRE

Jochelsons (Bergsland and Dirks 1 990:1 0-1 5). Likewise,the archaeological research methodologies of theseearly researchers often left much to be desired bymodern standards. Nevertheless, the groundwork laidby these scholars set the stage for a wide range ofanthropological research in the post-World War II years.It also left an important legacy for recently emergentefforts at perpetuating Aleut cultural heritage.

The World War II years and the years following havearguably witnessed more changes in Aleut culture thanany period since the early Russian era (cf. Veltre 1 990,1 999). In 1 942, Aleuts from far-western Attu Islandwere taken as prisoners by the Japanese, and allother Aleuts from St. Paul and St. George in the PribilofIslands and from villages west of the Alaska Peninsula-some 881 individuals—were taken by the U. S. militaryto internment camps in southeastern Alaska for theduration of the war (Kohlhoff 1 990; Veltre 1 992). Thiswas a period of severe deprivation and hardship,keeping the Aleut people away from their homes forseveral years, even long after the Japanese threat hadbeen eliminated. Following the war, several Aleutvillages were never reoccupied, while many of thoseto which the Aleut did return saw substantial changesin communication, education, economy, and the eth-nic makeup of their communities. Although the Aleutreturned to villages where pursuit of traditional lifestyleswas increasingly difficult and where, in some cases,they were on the verge of becoming ethnic minoritiesin their own communities, they nevertheless emergedfrom wartime internment with new knowledge andskills stemming from their contacts with the people,economy, and politics outside of the Aleut region.

For the first twenty-five years following World WarII, Aleuts in many communities became more and moreassimilated into the larger world. In the Pribilof Islands,the fur seal industry continued to be the mainstay ofeconomic life, while in the villages along the AlaskaPeninsula and the Aleutian Islands seasonal cash em-ployment in the growing fishing industry mixed withtraditional subsistence pursuits sustained the widely

3 1 1

dispersed population. During this time before 1 970, afew small archaeological research projects were un-dertaken throughout the region. In addition, two largerefforts were begun—a long-term and multidisciplinaryseries of investigations in and around the village ofNikolski on Umnak Island by William Laughlin and hiscolleagues beginning in 1 948, (cf. Laughlin 1 975), anda program of archaeological surveys and excavationson Amchitka Island conducted as part of the U.S. AtomicEnergy Commission's underground nuclear testing pro-gram from 1 964-72 (Sense and Turner 1 970; Turner1970; Desautels et al. 1971; Cook et al. 1972). Al-though undertaken with the knowledge and generalsupport of the Aleut people, these projects were initi-ated and conducted almost entirely without direct Aleutconsultation and involvement.

Research Since 1970

It was not until the 1 970s that the Aleut people wereable to exercise meaningful influence and control overarchaeological research in their region, and it has beenonly in very recent years that they have begun to takea more proactive role in determining the direction ofsuch research efforts. These changes have come aboutlargely due to the passage of several pieces of federallegislation.

The Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act. The mostsignificant of this recent legislation is the Alaska Na-tive Claims Settlement Act (ANCSA) of 1971, a lawhaving direct relevance to cultural heritage in at leasttwo main areas. First, ANCSA established regional andlocal Native for-profit corporations. As elsewhere inthe state, legal title to certain lands in the Aleut regionwas given to the regional for-profit Aleut Corporation,while title to other lands went to each of thirteen localAleut village for-profit corporations. The AleutCorporation's lands are distributed throughout muchof the region, while each village corporation's landsare for the most part immediately surrounding thatvillage. Because these regional and village lands in-cluded the archaeological sites on them, Aleuts for

the first time owned outright a significant portion oftheir cultural heritage. Thus, while prior to the passageof ANCSA archaeologists needed only to obtain a fed-eral Antiquities Act permit to pursue their work in mostof the Aleut region, now archaeologists wanting toconduct research on regional or village lands were re-quired only to go to the Aleut landowners to obtainpermission, the details and conditions of which wouldbe up to the parties to negotiate.

While archaeological projects on Aleut lands havebeen undertaken with the explicit permission of localand regional Aleut entities since 1971, few have in-volved the Aleut people directly in the planning,field, or analytical stages of work. This is primarily be-cause the Aleut have historically not had extensiveparticipation in the educational and research traditionsof the universities and government agencies that typi-cally sponsor such efforts. Also, real-life practical dif-ficulties faced by residents of the region, who mighthave to decide, for example, whether to forego sum-mer employment or subsistence pursuits to spendweeks or months away from home at a remote ar-chaeological field camp, have made participation dif-ficult.

Over the last few decades, however, this situationhas changed somewhat, as Aleut entities have begunto see how archaeology can be of service to them.The first regional Aleut Corporation-sponsored ar-chaeological project (Frohlich and Kopjanski 1975)occurred in 1 974, shortly after passage of ANCSA,when archaeologists were funded to conduct sitesurveys in the central and western Aleutian Islandsas part of efforts to apply for 1 4(h)(l) sites (see be-low). Since then, several additional—and mostly small-scale—archaeological and ethnohistorical projects havebeen initiated and underwritten by the regional corpo-ration to address other questions it deemed signifi-cant. These included, for example, research into his-torical Aleut land use patterns on Attu Island, done aspart of World War II restitution (Veltre 1 988), and anarchaeological survey to examine the condition of

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possibly vandalized archaeological properties on AdakIsland (Veltre 1 997a).

Likewise, some Aleut village non-profit and for-profitentities—like the St. Paul TDX Corporation, the Ouna-lashka in Unalaska Corporation, and the former UnalaskaAleut Development Corporation—have supported ar-chaeological investigations in their communities as partof their emerging interests in local history. One exampleof this was a project in historical archaeology andethnohistory on St. Paul Island (Fig. 96). An initialarchaeological survey of Russian and American pe-riod settlements on the island in 1 994 (Veltre andMcCartney 1 994, 2002) was followed by excavationsat one former village in 2000 and 2001. Archaeologi-cal efforts were combined with recording oral histo-ries from community residents (Veltre and McCartney2000, 2001). Instigated and underwritten in large partby the people of that community, this project servedtheir dual desires to understand better their island'shistory as well as to determine if archaeological re-sources could somehow be incorporated into their eco-nomically important tourism industry.

Other projects which have done a great deal tofurther the goals of Aleut-initiated archaeology havetaken place at several sites in the City of Unalaskaunder the guidance of Richard Knecht, Director of theMuseum of the Aleutians. Working with the coopera-tion of both the City and the Aleut village corporation,the Ounalashka Corporation, which owns the land onwhich many of the sites are located, professionals andvolunteers are able to balance archaeological pursuitswith their work and family commitments (Fig. 95). Suchbroad-based support, combined with logistical ease,has enabled Knecht to undertake large-scale excava-tions at a number of sites over the last seven years(Knecht and Davis 2001; Knecht 2003). Like the St.Paul survey and excavations described above for theOunalashka Corporation, such research efforts furthernot only cultural heritage goals but strategic ones aswell, since the sites have been located in prime areasfor future economic development.

ANCSA Section 14(h)(1). The second way in whichANCSA has affected Aleut cultural heritage is in itsprovision that title to culturally important lands nototherwise included within village or regional landselections could be transferred to the regional AleutCorporation. This was accomplished through theAct's Section 14(h)(l), a relatively minor feature of theoverall legislation, but a major force in matters of con-temporary cultural heritage throughout Alaska fromthe mid-1 970s to today.

Section 14(h)(l) of ANCSA provides for the transferof title to regional Native corporations of archaeologi-cal and other historical sites not otherwise selectedby local or regional Native corporations. By the filingdeadline in the late 1 970s, the Aleut Corporation hadsubmitted approximately 400 individual claims for ar-chaeological sites, the vast majority of which had neverbeen investigated archaeologically. Importantly, thework of the early archaeologists in the region wascritical to the Aleut Corporation's efforts: had manysite locations not been noted by Dall, Jochelson, orHrdlicka, they most likely never would have beenapplied for by the Aleut Corporation. Field investiga-tions of Aleut site applications by BIA ANCSA archae-ologists took place largely between 1 983 and 1 989(although some work continued until 1 998), withcrews mapping surface features, photographing sitelocalities, and plotting their locations on detailedmaps of the area. The only excavations that tookplace as part of these surveys were very limitedtests.

Reminiscent of Jochelson's earlier interest in oraltraditions as well as archaeological remains, an in-tegral and important part of the BIA ANCSA site inves-tigations was gathering oral testimony from the present-day Aleut residents, usually elders, from communitiesclose to the sites being investigated. This testimonywas used to bolster claims of significance for particu-lar sites. The audiotapes recorded in the Aleut regionremain a valuable—and untapped—resource on Aleutculture and history.

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An important consequence of the ANCSA 14(h)(l)surveys is that the sites conveyed under this provisionwill become the property of the Aleut Corporation,whose explicit permission will be a prerequisite forconducting archaeological research. To date, AleutCorporation leaders have been very supportive ofarchaeological research, recognizing therein an oppor-tunity to enhance understanding of Aleut heritage.

One current archaeological initiative undertaken withAleut Corporation permission is the Western AleutianHuman Paleoecology and Biodiversity Project, an interna-tional and interdisciplinary research program initiatedin 1 992 to focus on the Near Islands, the westernmostgroup in the Aleutian chain (Loring 1 994; Corbett et al.1 997). Building upon earlier Smithsonian scholarship inthe region by Dall, Stejneger, and Hrdlicka (which fo-cused on the possibility that the Aleutians served as apathway for human entry into the New World), thisresearch collaborative seeks to understand theemergence of cultural complexity in this remotearchipelago—one of the most geographically isolatedlandscapes ever colonized by maritime hunter-gatherers.

The research also seeks to utilize innovative datarecovery techniques from deeply stratified, well-pre-served village midden deposits to acquire detailedHolocene distributional and demographic data onbiodiversity. The analysis of faunal remains, especiallyfrom avian and marine mammals species, provides anopportunity to examine paleoecological changes atboth the local inter-island level as well as in the greaterNorth Pacific region as a whole. The research challengesthe assumption of ecological and cultural stasis in thearchipelago and reexamines the cultural and biologi-cal relationships between the Aleutian Islands and theAsian continent in light of the research initiatives oftheJNPE.

Repatriation Legislation. Two relatively recent piecesof federal legislation have also had an important im-pact on Aleut cultural heritage. These are the NationalMuseum of the American Indian Act of 1989 and the

Native American Graves Protection and RepatriationAct (NAGPRA) of 1 990. These laws, which parallel oneanother in purpose, provide for the repatriation ofhuman remains, associated funerary objects, and ob-jects of cultural patrimony from the Smithsonian Insti-tution and other repositories around the country toNative American groups.

As an initial result of this legislation, the Aleut (likemany other Native groups) are learning for the first timeabout the existence of collections of materials fromtheir region. Aleut entities ranging from the regionalAleut Corporation to the various village councils andcorporations have been inundated with inventories ofspecimens sent by over one hundred institutions.However, because these two repatriation laws arecomplex and costly to deal with for institutions aswell as for Native groups, their full effects have not yetbeen felt in the Aleut region. Further, since there is nostatute of limitations for making repatriation requests,regional and local Aleut groups have so far taken aconservative and cautious approach to the entireissue, learning from the repatriation experiences of otherNative groups. To date, a small number of NationalPark Service NAGPRA Documentation Awards havebeen made to local Aleut groups, one being the AleutRepatriation Commission, an entity set up specificallyto deal with repatriation matters for a coalition ofvillages.

Aleut Cultural Identity. Concomitant with theprocesses discussed above has been another changeinstigated by the empowerment engendered by ANCSAand other legislation. In recent years many Nativegroups in Alaska (as well as indigenous groups world-wide) have begun to dispense with use of the namesgiven to them by outsiders—either other Native groupsor westerners—and to return to more traditionalautonyms. In the Aleut region, this has meant that thetraditional names Unangan(m the eastern dialect) andUnangasim the Atka, or central, dialect) have begun tobe Used (often in the form Unangax) by some Nativeresidents, since "Aleut" was never used in pre-Russian

3 1 4

CURATORS AND CONSUMERS/ALEUTIANS

times to designate the people of the region as awhole. It was only after the arrival of Russians that"Aleut" became broadly—and confusingly—employedto include not only the Aleut but also Native residentsof Alutiiq-speaking areas of south-central Alaska.

Whether Unangax will gain widespread acceptanceamong the Aleut is unknown at this time, although asurvey of elders in the region in the summer of 1 997showed support for use of the term, and one localgroup—the Qawalangin Tribe of Unalaska—fully backsits use (Barbara Svarny Carlson, pers. comm.). What isclear, however, is that for some Aleut people todaythe use of the term is a matter of substantial cultural—and political—significance.

Conclusions

Throughout Alaska today. Native people are reassert-ing their rights of self-determination and are workingboth to strengthen and to reestablish connections totheir traditional pasts. This is certainly the case in theAleut region, where land ownership and control ofarchaeological properties have provided the basis forthe Aleut people to take a more active role participat-ing in, and developing goals for, cultural heritageprojects of many kinds. For the first three-quarters ofthis century, at the same time that federal assimilationistpolicies and outside economic interests were increas-ingly undermining traditional aspects of Aleut culture,anthropologists, archaeologists, and linguists wereattempting to document both the distant past as wellas traditional aspects of contemporary Aleut life. Thus,Aleuts today, in their pursuit of cultural heritage ef-forts, are building an understanding of their past in partupon the foundations laid by earlier researchers in theregion. The oral tradition research of Barbara SvarnyCarlson, for example, has made extensive use of therecently published stories recorded on wax cylindersby Waldemarjochelson some 90 years ago (Bergslandand Dirks 1 990).

One recent and important development for culturalheritage pursuits in the Aleut region was the decision

in early 1 998 by the regional non-profit Aleutian/PribilofIslands Association (A/PIA) to establish a formal Cul-tural Heritage Department. This program is currentlypursuing a broad and creative range of cultural heri-tage goals, including developing a comprehensive Aleutresources librar/, working to revitalize the Aleut lan-guage, and furthering repatriation issues. In 1 999 theA/PIA co-curated the installation of a case study onAleut history and culture in the Native North AmericanHall at the Smithsonian's National Museum of NaturalHistory. The exhibit marked the return to theSmithsonian of Aleut scholarship and self determina-tion in providing an Aleut perspective that followed,by 1 20 years the insights furnished by George Tsaroff.It is worth noting that even the Cultural HeritageDepartment owes its existence to ANCSA, since asignificant portion of its operating budget comes fromBIA 14(h)(1) funds which were contracted to A/PIA(Veltre 1 997 b).

It is clear that the survival of the Aleut as a distinc-tive cultural group will involve two particular efforts.On the one hand, in a process that began perhaps twodecades ago, the Aleut have become increasinglyinterested in learning about their pre-contact and post-contact cultural heritage. This has been done largelythrough archaeological efforts, but has also been pur-sued through other ethnohistorical endeavors, such asthe study of museum collections of ethnographic speci-mens, recording of local oral histories, family heritageprojects, stewardship programs, and the like. More-over, the Aleut have relatively recently begun to viewarchaeological research as a means to investigatequestions of specific interest to them, such as thosedealing with historical land use.

On the other hand, the Aleut have begun to res-urrect traditional cultural activities—traditional inspirit if not in actual content. Skin boat building andtraditional house building projects—as have beenundertaken in Atka, St. Paul, and Unalaska—and similarundertakings are examples of this. Perhaps nowhereis interest in past traditions more evident than in

S LORINC AND D W VELTRE

3 1 5

the rediscovery—and, largely, the re-invention—ofAleut dance that began in 1995. Since that time,dance groups have emerged in at least three Aleutcommunities, Atka, St. Paul, and St. George, the danc-ers combining the very limited ethnohistorical informa-tion regarding older Aleut dance forms with elementsof contemporary Alaska Native dance (Fig. 97). Thissynthesis has generated enormous pride among theAleut throughout the region.

Finally, the survival of Aleut culture seems predi-cated on Aleuts' abilities to maintain a distinct self-identity, rather than on the content of that identity.That is, while this identity may be rooted in part onspecific cultural traditions having demonstrable rootsin their pre-contact past, it may just as well be basedon modified or newly emergent cultural forms. Whenunderstood in light of the historical and legislative pro-cesses by which the Aleut people have come to havemore control over their own lives, the legacy of theJesup Expedition and related early anthropologicalventures in the Aleut region lies both in the founda-tions they provided for subsequent more formal in-quiry as well as in the wealth and diversity of informa-tion they collected which is now forming an importantbasis of modern Aleut cultural heritage efforts.

Acknowledgments

There are many entities which deserve thanks for theirhelp over the years with our individual research projectsmentioned in this paper. These include the Aleut orga-nizations which made our work possible through per-mission to work on their lands and in kind support:The Aleut Corporation, the Aleutian/Pribilof Islands As-sociation, the Ounalashka Corporation, the TDX Cor-poration, and the St. Paul Tribal Government. In addi-tion, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, especially theCaptain and crew of their research vessel Tiglax, haveprovided logistical support and permission for someof our field projects. For their generous in kind assis-tance, thanks go to all the folks at Reeve Aleutian Air,PenAir and Northern Air Cargo who have safely, and so

efficiently, transported our equipment, crews, and speci-mens. Finally, we wish to acknowledge Allen McCartneyfor his inspiration and collaboration over the years.

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1 999 Environmental Perspectives on HistoricalPeriod Cultural Change Among the Aleuts ofSouthwestern Alaska. In Development and Envi-ronment in the North. Proceedings of the 13th In-ternational Abashiri Symposium, The HokkaidoMuseum of Northern Peoples. Pp. 1 -12. Abashiri,Japan: Association for the Promotion of North-ern Cultures.Veltre, Douglas W., and Allen P. McCartney1994 An Archaeological Survey of the early Russianand Aleut Settlements on St. Paul Island, Pribilof Is-lands, Alaska. Report submitted to the TDX Corpora-tion, St. Paul, Alaska.

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3 1 8

85/ "Crossroads of Continents" exhibit on tour at the Anchorage Museum of IHi story and Art, 1991

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86/ A dear friend, Sergei Serov (1940-1992), Rus-sian Crossroads exhibit coordinator and Latin Ameri-can culture expert, seen here helping mount archaeo-logical specimens during one of the American museumvenues. Photographer, William Fitzhugh

87/ Reception for the North American Crossroads team at the Museum of Anthropology and Ethnog-raphy (MAE) director's office in St. Petersburg, then Leningrad in 1983. MAE director, Rudolf Its,stands at his desk under the portrait of Vladimir Lenin. Other participants include (sitting left toright): Joan MacDonald, Bill Holm, William Sturtevant, Sergei Arutiunov (Institute of Ethnography,Moscow), James VanStone, George MacDonald. Photographer, William Fitzhugh

320

88/Andres Slapinsh, Latvian film producer, mailing ethnographic films among the Eveni< people inEast Siberia. Several Slapinsh's videos were used for the public programs accompanying "Cross-roads of Continents" exhibits. Slapinsh was killed by Soviet troops in the winter of 1991 while filmingan independence rally in his native Latvia

89/ The "Mini-Crossroads" team departing on its tour to Siberia. Nome, 1990. Left to right: RogerPowers, Darlene Orr, Valerie Chaussonnet, James Dixon, William Fitzhugh

3 2 1

90/Mini-Crossroads exhibition being unloaded from a Russian Yal<-40 transportplane. Vladivostok, Russia, August 1997. Photographer, Olga Shubina

91 / Mini-Crossroads in Russia: school tours at the exhibit, Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk, December 1997. Photographer,Olga Shubina

322

92/ Jochel son's display of the re-sults of the RyabushinskiExpedition's archaeological workin the Aleutian Islands andKamchatka at the Imperial Rus-sian Geographical Society in St.Petersburg. Model of a sectionfrom the shell-midden atAglagaxon Umnak Island reveals the deepstratigraphy of many Aleut villagesites (NAA 2003-20968)

93/ Informal photographs of Aleut are almost non-existent in Jochelson's photography making this picture ofAleut children most unusual. It appears as the very last image in a photograph album that he presented to theNational Museum which suggests that he was cognizant of the continuity between the archaeological materi-als he excavated and the contemporary Aleut communities he visited (NAA 89-11741).

3 2 3

94/ Waldemar Jochelson with Aleut laborers in a deep midden cut, probably on UmnakIsland, 1909 (NAA 89-11750)

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95/ Excavations at the Margaret Bay archaeologicalsite by Rick Knecht have revealed a stone-walled Aleuthouse dating to ca. 3100 B.P. A structure of morerecent vintage stands in the distance. Photographer,Douglas Veltre.

96/ A portion of the village of St. Paul in the Pribilof Islands, with fur seals resting on thebeach in the foreground. Photographer, Douglas Veltre.

97/ The Atka Dancers (Atxam Taliigisnikangis) at the Aleut Elders' Conference, Unalaska,1996. Since their founding in 1995, the Atka Dancers have performed at numerous na-tional and Alaskan venues. Photographer, Douglas Veltre

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98/ Yakut artisan, Anna Nikolaeva dressed in a furcoflt or buuktaakh son, whicli she produced followingthe photos from the AMNH collection. Front view.

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/ 01/ Woman's fur coat created by costume designerLena Gogoleva for characters in the Yakut/Sakha op-era Nyurgun Bootur, performed by the Yakut Theaterof Ballet and Opera

327

102/ Musqueam house post purchased by Harlan Smith, 1898 (AMNH 42936)

103/ Susan Point, House Posts, 1997. University ofBritish Columbia Museum of Anthropology, Vancouver,B.C. Nbz 838, 837. Photograph courtesy Susan Pointand Bill McLennan.

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104/ Masset village, Haida, 1879. Photograph by O. C. Hastings (RBCM, PN-10980)

3 29

7 05/ Alert Bay, Kwakwaka 'wakw, 1910. Photographer unknown (RBCM, PN-10189)

330

/ 06/Ellen Neel (1916-1966) in 1950. Photograph cour-tesy Phil Nuytten.

108/ Ellen Neel, Totemland Pole, 1950. Photographcourtesy Phil Nuytten

109/Matthias JoeCapilano, Thunderbird Dynasty Pole,Stanley Park, Vancouver, British Columbia, 1936.Photograph courtesy of Vancouver ArchivesIN N 103.1

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110/ Susan Point (b. 1952) in 1997. Photograpli courtesy of Susan Point and Bill McLennan.

111/ Susan Point, Common Thread, 2000. SpiritWrestler Gallery, Vancouver, BC. Photograph courtesySusan Point, Spirit Wrestler Gallery, and Kenji Nagai.

In fvt^niom of Vladimir |vanov~(Jnarov, ] ^^/—lOOO

MARJORIE MANDELSTAM BALZER

Vladimir Kharlampovich Ivanov-Unarov, sixty-four,scholar of the art and spiritual culture of indigenouspeoples of the North, died in Yakutsk, Sakha Republic(Yakutia), Russian Federation, December 29, 2000. Hiscareful fieldwork and refined scholarship covered arange of peoples, from the Evenk, Even, Yukagir, Chukchiand Yakut (Sakha) of his native republic, to peoples ofNorth America. Author of numerous monographs andarticles, including Yakut Bone Carving and Problems ofFolk Ornamental Art, his knowledge of the peoples ofthe Far North was deep as well as broad.

Continuing the tradition of meticulous ethnogra-phers of the nineteenth century, he brought back tolife the Jesup North Pacific Expedition's volume byWaldemarjochelson The Yukaghir and the YukaghirzedTungus by translating it into Russian and having it trans-lated into Yukagir for the remaining indigenous com-munities of the Sakha North. He was active, with hiswife and colleague Zinaida Ivanova-Unarova, in the Jesup2 project that brought indigenous peoples and schol-ars together at the American Museum of Natural His-tory in New York in 1 997. Famously productive, hewas one of the only people in the history of founda-tion grants to complete a MacArthur-funded projectbefore his supporters expected.

Vladimir bridged multiple disciplines with his per-ceptive, boundary-crossing intelligence, and bridgedmultiple cultures with his contributions to internationalcommunication. A mentor and friend to many, he en-couraged colleagues in the Sakha Republic to make

7 / 2/ Vladimir Ivanov-Unarov (1937-2000). Photog-rapher, Marjorle Mandelstam Balzer.

the leap into collaborative work with American andEuropean scholars. After several trips to the U.S., hewas pivotal in returning the knowledge and wealth ofspiritual and material culture kept in American muse-ums back to his people through successful academicand public lectures and slide shows. He was a founderand mainstay of the department he headed in the Acad-emy of Sciences Institute of the Problems of Minoritiesof the North, and was often asked to take on more

3 34

administrative responsibility than he wanted. Originallytrained as a geologist before gaining a degree in ArtHistory, Vladimir's combined scientific and humanitiesfocused approaches were fieldwork based, ethno-graphic, and flexible. One of his last projects includedhelping to adapt a cultural studies curriculum to theneeds of the Sakha Republic.

Gentle and generous, Vladimir's great empathyand brilliant analysis of the symbols that make livesmeaningful made him one of the most important men-tors and examples of my life. At one breakfast hepatiently explained the symbolism and history of thebeautiful wooden Sakha challices (choron) that holdfermented mare's milk. That breakfast lasted for hours,

going nearly until lunch.

I am deeply privileged to have been welcomedinto the love of his multigenerational family. Each timeI enthusiastically would come home with news ofmeeting a Sakha, Even, Evenk or Yukagir colleague inYakutsk, Vladimir would provide wonderful back-ground on the significance of their work and the kinnetworks and political backgrounds of their families.His perspective on life in the republic was invaluable. Irecall him at his happiest playing with his grandchil-dren, and teaching them how to get onto the Internet.He is survived by his wife and colleague Zina, "son thedoctor" Maxim, his daughter Marina the artist, and theirpartners and wonderful children.

335

1

"y~!ie f^evitaiization of the *]~raclitiona!(^uiture of fNjortfieast Siberian peoples

Ko!e of the Jesup f~ xpeditioi

VLADIMIR IVANOV-UNAROV

AND ZINAIDA IVANOVA-UNAROVA

From papers published in Russian anthropological jour-nals at the beginning of the twentieth century, it isapparent that teams of the Jesup North Pacific Expedi-tion (JNPE) had operated in the Northeast of Russia in1 898-1902. Unfortunately, this expedition was hardlymentioned during the Soviet period of Russia's history.Data on and references to the expedition's materialswere censored primarily for political reasons. The formerleader of the Siberian portion of the JNPE, Waldemar(Vladimir) Jochelson, after being officially permitted togo the U.S. in the 1920s to complete his Jesup Expedi-tion monograph about the Yukagir, failed to return toSoviet Russia. Until the middle of the 1980s the overallscope of the Jesup Expedition, the value of its Siberiancollections as well as their present fate, remained allbut unknown in the former Soviet Union, particularly inthe regions where the JNPE teams once operated.

How We Became Acquainted with theCollections of the Jesup Expedition

During Soviet times, any thought of traveling fromthe authors' native city of Yakutsk to New York tostudy the JNPE Siberian collection would have beenequivalent to thinking about flying to the moon. Butthe great transformation that occurred in Russia dur-ing the past decade changed everything, including ourlives. On February 3, 1991, then-US Ambassador toRussia, Jack Matlock, and his wife Rebecca Matlockstopped for two days in Yakutsk on their way toKhabarovsk, a city in the Russian Far East. They came

not as official visitors but as guests of the newlyestablished local association, "Sakha omyk" (SakhaNation). The Americans, who were interested in theculture and art of the Native peoples of Siberia, paida visit to the Artists' Union of the Republic of Sakha(then, Yakutskaya ASSR). We, as art historians, quicklyorganized a small display of indigenous art and in-troduced the guests to local artists. During our con-versations we asked Ambassador Matlock aboutthe current location of the Jesup Expedition's Siberiancollections. He promised to find out and let us know.But Mrs. Matlock suggested that we could visit NewYork and search for the JNPE Siberian treasures our-selves. For the first time this previously unthinkableventure seemed possible.

In 1992 few Russian curators and art historians hadthe opportunity to leave the country on work-relatedtrips. But luck was with us and we received a grantfrom the Soros Foundation for travel and a two-monthstay in the U.S. Thus, in November and December of1992, we were able to work full time in the collectionsof the American Museum of Natural History in NewYork. The American Museum astounded us with itsopenness. Laurel Kendall, curator of the Asian andSiberian collections, did everything possible to ensurethat our work with museum materials, including notonly the ethnographic objects but also archival docu-ments and historical photographs, would be produc-tive. She encouraged us to take photographs andto make photocopies of many historical documents,

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such as personal letters and diaries of the Jesup Expe-dition participants that were stored at the AMNH ar-chives. Only someone who has once worked in themuseums and archives of the former Soviet Union canfully appreciate the level of friendliness and hospitalitywe encountered at the AMNH.

The Siberian Team of the Jesup Expedition

The work of the Jesup Expedition is sufficiently describedin the literature (Boas 1903, 1905; Freed et al., 1988a,1988b). We will focus here on a few details that havenot been covered and also, but very briefly, on thoseaspects necessary for an understanding of the issueswe deal with in this article.

The main goal of the Jesup Expedition, formulatedby Franz Boas, was to look for the origin of AmericanIndians and for their possible routes into the New Worldfrom Northeast Asia using ethnographic evidence aswell as folklore and linguistic data, and to study thephysical anthropology of the local people. In accor-dance with this basic goal. Boas assigned to expedi-tion participants strictly defined tasks in the collectionof field materials. In order to study the connectionsbetween the Native peoples of North America andNortheast Siberia it was necessary to find scholars whowere both familiar with the culture of the studiedpeoples and willing to work with the expedition,often in rugged and remote areas. For the northeastSiberian part of theJNPE, these two requirements weremet quite successfully. The then-director of the Rus-sian Academy of Sciences' Museum of Anthropologyand Ethnology in St. Petersburg, Prof. Vasily V. Radloff(Radlov), recommended Waldemar Jochelson (Vlad-imir I. lochelson, 1855-1937) and Waldemar Bogoras(Vladimir C. Bogoraz, 1865-1936) to Boas as highlyqualified specialists with excellent first-hand knowledgeof the region (see more in Cole 2001:37-9; Vakhtin2001:78-82).

Jochelson and Bogoras were former political dis-sidents, who had been sentenced by the Russiancourt to spend several years in exile in northern Yakutia

for their participation in the revolutionary Populistmovement. Their place of exile eventually becameboth the location for and the object of self-initiatedscientific study. The innovative idea of "going to thepeople" turned into an active interest in research onthe languages and culture(s) of the local populations.In 1894, Dimitri Klements, then the Chairman of theEast Siberia Branch of the Russian Geographic Societyencouraged them to Join the Yakut (Sibiryakov) Ex-pedition, organized with funds from the Russian gold-mining magnate, Alexander M. Sibiryakov. Klements'task for Bogoras was to collect data on the Chukchi,the Even (Lamut), and the local Russian-speaking(Creole) populations of northern Siberia. Jochelson livedmore than two years among the Yukagir people (1895-1896), traveled with them on their annual migrationroutes, documented two Yukagir languages, and puttogether a dictionary of 9000 words and over 1 50folklore texts (Shavrov 1935:49). One of Jochelson'sfield Journals from 1896, when he lived among theUpper Kolyma River Yukagir, is now preserved in theAMNH archive (AMNH-DA, Box A). A small notebook,entitled 'Travel notes No. 3," contains valuable infor-mation but is written in small, Russian handwriting thatis hard to make out. We prepared a few passages fromthe journal for publication in a recent issue of the Yakut(Sakha) literary journal Ilin (Ivanov-Unarov and Ivanova1998).

In addition to the Yukagir, Jochelson's interests in-cluded the Yakut (Sakha) people. During his years ofexile in Yakutia he became acquainted with many ofthe Yakut cultural workers and representatives of theYakut intelligentsia. He also knew the Yakut (Sakha)language. According to several reports, the Yakut(Sakha) language was then the primary mean of com-munication in many areas of Yakutia, even for the localRussian population.

In the fall of 1898 Jochelson received a letterfrom Boas, offering him a three-year contract withmonthly pay of $100 and $4000 for field expensesduring the time he served with the Jesup Expedition

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(Vakhtin 2001:80-1).' Intense correspondence beganat this time between Boas and Jochelson, giving apicture of both their relationship and the course ofthe proposed fieldwork (these letters are now keptin Jochelson's file in the AMNH-DA archives). Accord-ing to the contract, all scientific data, ethnographiccollections, and field journals were to become theproperty of the American Museum of Natural Historyin New York.

In his letter of reply, Jochelson agreed to the overallplan for the expedition. Judging by Boas' response,Jochelson also submitted a series of his own sugges-tions, broadening the tasks set by Boas in the collec-tion of materials and in subsequent publications. Boasresponded appropriately, though somewhat severely,insisting that Jochelson should fulfill the tasks as theywere assigned to him. He reminded Jochelson that,according to the original contract, Jochelson's primaryJob for the American Museum was the survey of theKoryak; his visit to the Yukagir was only to collectartifacts. Boas did not have any objections to thecollection of additional material as long as it did notinterfere with the fulfillment of Jochelson's basic task.Boas also stated that the museum did not have anyinterest in publishing Jochelson's materials other than amonograph about the Koryak; but that if there wereto be a publication about the Yukagir it should bequite short."

During the preparation and actual fieldwork of theJesup Expedition, Jochelson managed to convince Boasand, it seems, AMNH President Morris K. Jesup , of thenecessity of broadening the study area, to include—inaddition to the Koryak and Chukchi—other Siberianpeoples, such as the Yukagir, the Even (Lamut), and theYakut (Sakha).

In August of 1899, Jochelson and Bogoras met inSt. Petersburg and worked out a plan for their coop-erative field research. Jochelson notified Boas of this ina letter on October 30.^ Given Bogoras's knowledgeof the Chukchi language, they proposed that they wouldwork together for one and a half years with the Koryak,

whose language is close to Chukchi. Bogoras wouldconcentrate on study of the Koryak language andthe collection of folklore texts. Jochelson would makeanthropometric measurements, take photographs,and collect ethnographic objects for the Museum.After the joint survey of the Koryak, they would setoff separately—Jochelson to the land of the Yukagir tothe west and Bogoras to the Siberian Eskimo (Yupik)country to the northeast, along the shores of theBering Strait and the Arctic Ocean. Boas did not ap-prove their plan to work together, and they ended upworking separately.

In March 1 900, Jochelson received a letter fromMorris K. Jesup saying that Jochelson was to be incharge of the (North) Siberian section of the expedi-tion and stipulated the pay Jochelson would receive.''In August of the same year, Jochelson, his wife DinaJochelson-Brodsky, and two other members of his fieldteam, Alexander Axelrod and Norman Buxton, arrivedin the small town of Gizhiga on the coast of the Sea ofOkhotsk to study the local Koryak (Fig. 7). A monthearlier, Bogoras, accompanied by his wife Sofia, arrivedat the mouth of the Anadyr River to begin his workwith the Chukchi.

As a result, the two Siberian teams of the JesupExpedition gathered a huge amount of informationabout not only the Chukchi and the Koryak but alsothe Yukagir, Even (Lamut), and Yakut (Sakha). Alto-gether, some 6400 items they had collected weredelivered to the American Museum of Natural Historyin New York. According to Jochelson's final report, 91 7of these were Yakut (Sakha) objects, 300 were Yukagir,and more than 5000 were from the Koryak, Even,Chukchi, and Siberian Eskimo. In addition, there werehundreds of photographs, phonograph recordings,and other research materials. Besides the two origi-nally planned monographs on the Chukchi (Bogoras1904-9) and Koryak (Jochelson 1908) for the JNPEseries, two more monographs were eventually pub-lished on the Yukagir Gochelson 1926) and the Yakut/Sakha Gochelson 1933).

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The Siberian Collection of the Jesup Expedition

The ethnographic objects collected by Jochelson andBogoras some 100 years ago were quite significantfor academic and museum researchers who were in-terested in Native Siberian peoples. They also seemed"exotic" and exciting to the general European and Ameri-can public. But at the time they were collected, thesewere quite ordinary items, used routinely for both dailylife and festivals. Today, after a hundred years that haveseen profound changes in these cultures, the signifi-cance of the Jesup Expedition collections has changeddramatically, first and foremost for the bearers of thesecultures.

The Sakha (Yakut) Collection

878 items from the JNPE collections are identified inthe AMNH catalog as "Yakut." These are not only piecesof Native art but also many everyday objects, withoutartistic embellishment, as well as models and toys.The most complete samples represent Yakut/Sakhadecorated clothing, silver decorations, wood carvings,ceramic objects with ornamentation, and traditionalhorse gear.

There are also several ivory carvings, which theAMNH records identify as "Russified" objects. Interest-ingly, there is a storage box made of mammoth ivorythat is almost an exact copy of a box from 1 799 thatis in the State Historical Museum in Moscow. It differsin only a few minor details, namely, the subject matterdepicted on the sides of the box. We believe this piecewas made by a Yakut ivory carver, most probably byLeontii Popov. Though Yakut ivory objects from theeighteenth century were commonly copies of can/-ings by northern Russian carvers from the town ofKholmogory, there were already at that time certainfeatures that clearly distinguished Yakut artists, espe-cially in technique, ornamentation, and subject matter.

On the whole, objects from the Yakut (Sakha) col-lection at the AMNH are typical and quite familiar,and not significantly different from objects in othermuseums. This further substantiates the stability of the

Native traditions. However, within the Yakut collec-tion at the AMNH there are many unique objects thatdo not exist in museums in Russia.

The collection illustrates the variety of women'swinter and summer/fall fur coats. Altogether thereare thirty-two coats and fur robes in the American Mu-seum. Six of these are so-called "khotoidookh son" ("furcoat with eagle") the likes of which do not exist in anymuseum in Yakutia (Sakha Republic). Local artists arevery interested in this type of traditional women's dress,although they had never before seen them. Havingonly before heard about this type, they are now creat-ing their own modern versions based on items in theAMNH collections. For example, in 1992 Anastasia E.Sivtseva, an acclaimed Yakut seamstress, sewed a furcoat for the exhibition "Kudai Bakhs/ with an eagle onthe back showing head, claws, and wings. In this case,the Yakut fur robes from the American Museum collec-tion provided her with an original example of this typeof fur clothing. They were acquired in the Middle-Kolyma iSrednekolymsk) and Verkhoyansk districts innorthern Yakutia. It is most likely that they are from thesecond half of the nineteenth century. There is there-fore no doubt that they represent the old type of Yakutsangyakh. These have been mentioned in the literature,including a mention by the famous Yakut historian,Sehen Bolo.^ Jochelson, who acquired these fur robesfrom the northern Yakut calls them " kybytyylaakh son"apparently the name his informants used for them. Thismeans simply, "fur robe with an inset."

It is well known that the eagle is a sacred bird formany peoples, including the Yakut and many NorthAmerican Indians. Among the Yakut, its name may noteven be spoken aloud. The folklorist and founder ofYakut literature, A. Kulakovskii, wrote that the Yakutdo not dare pronounce aloud the word "khotoi" (eagle),calling it instead "toion" that is, "master." As a result, inmany Sakha/Yakut settlements the word "khotoi' hasbeen completely forgotten (Kulakovskii 1979:79, 92).At the same time, the technique for making the robe isreflected in the name "kybytyylaakh son" recorded by

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Jochelson, which is kyhytan tigii, "sewn inset." The robesfrom his collection are made from a variety of materi-als. For example, one robe is made of quite expensivelynx fur (AMNH # 70/8525). On the back it has a slittypical of all Yakut fur robes and coats. However, theslit is absent in all the other "eagle robes" from theJochelson AMNH collection; instead, it is replaced by amock slit—an ornamental fur stripe. This is stronglyreminiscent of the northern type of caftan. An inset ofdark brown otter fur is sewn on the back of the "eaglerobe" (AMNH # 70/8525), reminiscent of a bird's spreadwings. The other robes are made of dark brown Sibe-rian marmot fur, white reindeer fur, and calf and foalhides. All the robes have the same inset made of darkerfur in the form of open wings; this is why they arecalled "khotoidookh son" (fur robe with eagle).

The belepchi (AMNH # 70/8826) that Jochelson ac-quired in the village of Churapcha is another rare item.Belepchi is an article of clothing no longer made. Sakha/Yakut men wore it over their trousers, both for warmthand as a component of festival wear. There is only onespecimen preserved in the local museum. It was foundin the late seventeenth or early eighteenth century graveof a man. Sakha ethnographer F. Zykov sees a parallelbetween Yakut men's belepchi and women's belebshiamong the Buryat, Kirgiz, and Kazakh (Zykov1993:268). At the same time, the Kirgiz epic "Manas"mentions bei'demchi as male armor. It should be notedthat Jochelson acquired most of the items for his Yakut(Sakha) collection in the village of Churapcha on theleft bank of the Lena River, 200 km north of the cityof Yakutsk. He justifiably thought that ancient Yakuttradition would be best preserved here and arguedthis in his letter to Boas. The Jesup belepchi is particu-larly valuable because, unlike the single surviving ar-chaic specimen recovered from the grave, this was atype that was actually worn in Jochelson's time.

There are also decorated "ribbons for the fiancee'sroom." They are two leather straps, almost four meterslong, but only about two centimeters wide, decoratedwith beads and round metal plates and finished on the

end with a fringe of suede leather (rovduga). Theirsignificance is now forgotten, even by the elders.

The AMNH collection also contains engraved sil-ver Jewelry with the engraving in good condition.Among the unique artifacts made of wood and birchbark, there is a complete set of summer birch-barkcovering for a Yakut urasa (summer dwelling). Jochelsonsuggested to Boas in a letter that he would like tobuild a full-size urasa in the American Museum court-yard, using the precise model that he had acquired forhis Yakut collection. If Jochelson had indeed built this,it would today be the only authentic, non-recon-structed Yakut urasa in the world.

The Even (Lamut) Collection

There are 481 artifacts in the AMNH Even catalog.Most of these objects were collected by Bogoras' wife,Sofia Bogoras, in the village of Markovo on the AnadyrRiver. She made several trips there from the fall of 1900to April 1901, while her husband, along with a Cos-sack and a local guide, was on a long trip to Kamchatkain search of Chukchi and Koryak materials.^

In addition to these, there are also several Evenitems acquired by Jochelson. During a trip in two boatson the Sea of Okhotsk to the mouth of the NayakhanRiver he discovered a sixty-one tent Tungus (Even) camp.There he succeeded in collecting ample ethnographicdata about Even people who were living along theSea of Okhotsk coast. He wrote Boas about this in hisletter-report from Kushka.'

We made a detailed study of Jochelson's collec-tion of Even clothing and have concluded that it istypical for reindeer Even in cut and style, though thecharacter of the decorations shows a certain Koryakinfluence.

The Yukagir Collection

Comprised of 342 artifacts, it is unique in that it con-tains practically every type of clothing and daily useobjects of a small Native nation that was in danger ofcultural extinction. Jochelson was fully aware of this

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and he stated many times that he considered hisJNPE volume, The Yukaghirs and the YukaghirizedTungus (1926) a memorial for a vanishing people. Fol-lowing his earlier work among the Yukagir on the Rus-sian Sibiryakov Expedition he wrote: "In a few decadesthe Yukagir language could disappear and the tribewould under these conditions, cease to exist, a partdying and a part dissolving into other tribes" Cochelson1900:xv).

In our view, the most valuable items in the JNPEYukagir collection are the numerous birch-bark objects,including maps and letters engraved on bark as wellas wooden and birch-bark animal figures.

The Koryak and Chukchi Collections

The very rich Koryak and the somewhat smaller Chukchicollections were acquired by Jochelson and Bogoras.The collecting process was unbelievably difficult be-cause of the climate, lack of roads, and attitude ofthe local people. Bogoras almost died of influenzaon his return trip from Kamchatka in the winter of 1901.The Koryak, who were on friendly terms with Jochel-son, made sure that none of their traditions wouldbe violated or dishonored in the collecting process.Nevertheless, Jochelson's Koryak collection containsseveral shaman drums and also samples of burial cloth-ing, acquired in the village of Kamenskoe in northernKamchatka. According to Koryak beliefs, the latter mustnot be shown to anyone.

Jochelson was evidently charming and persuasiveas a collector and field worker. For proof of this here isanother example: When he arrived in the Yakut villageof Churapcha at the beginning of May 1902, the localresidents gave him not only a complete urasa (birchbark summer dwelling), but they also held a ysyakhfestival especially for him. This festival was usually heldtwo months later, at the end of June, before hayingbegan (Fig. 113).

Berthold Laufer, another Jesup Expedition Siberiancollector, on his earlier trip among the Amur Riverpeople (1898-9) assembled a small collection from

V. IVANOV-UNAROV AND Z. IVANOVA-UNAROVA

the local Evenk people who lived along the AmgunRiver, a tributary to the Amur River. Altogether, eight-five Evenk artifacts collected by Laufer are listed inthe AMNH catalog along with many from Laufer'sobjects acquired among the Nivkh, the Nanay, theOrok, and the Ainu.

One Hundred Years after Jesup 1

Although the European takeover of the Arctic beganlong before the start of the twentieth century, it at firstdid not move particularly quickly nor did it have anydecisive impact. Thus, despite several destructiveevents, the peoples who inhabited the arctic regionsusually had time to adapt to this tempo and to pre-serve the integrity of their cultures, traditional econo-mies, their beliefs, customs, and rituals, clothing andutensils, and decorative art. But in the twentieth cen-tury the social shocks and intensive exploitation ofnatural resources in the North brought irredeemablelosses to the Native people at all levels.

A number of factors have brought on the currentcrisis for the traditional cultures of the Native peopleof the Russian Arctic. The Soviet government's declaredprogram for northern indigenous people of "transitionfrom primitive social structure to socialism, by-passingthe stage of capitalism" meant that the specificcharacteristics of these small nations and their cul-tures were ignored. This caused a quickening in thedestruction of their way of life; a way of life that hadadapted over millennia and was ideally suited to theextreme conditions of the Arctic. Many aspects ofNative legacies were lost and there was the distinctthreat of complete assimilation and/or extinction forthe smaller indigenous nations such as the Yukagir.

Beginning in the 1930s the destruction of the so-cial and economic fabric was hastened by the seizureof property, the formation of collective farms {kolkhozes)and "state-farms" (sovkhozes), the enforced transitionto a settled way of life and "villagization." This wasaccompanied by a process of banning and houndingout traditional beliefs, customs, and rituals that were

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seen as out-dated, archaic, and even savage. Thiscensure of Native spiritual traditions delivered a heavyblow to the indigenous people and triggered the lossof a substantial component of their cultural legacy.The Eurocentric theory of cultural evolution was firmlyestablished as an ideological paradigm in the formerSoviet Union. According to this theory, with the ap-pearance of professional art and literature, traditionalfolk art becomes merely historical atavism and oughtto disappear. It was thought that this was a naturalstep in the progressive development of a people andtheir culture.

This stereotypical viewpoint has unfortunatelyproved very persistent and is still held by many schol-ars even today. Supporters of this theory advisedNative artisans to replace their traditional ornamentswith modern Soviet emblems. They embraced the so-called authored, creative approach to artistic produc-tion and demanded of folk art that it be innovativeand modern. The vulgar, materialist approach to folkart focused on the external form of the artwork, com-pletely ignoring the semiotic content that had beenworked out over centuries. It is well known that ineach specimen produced by a folk artist, in every motifand in the composition of ornaments there is a definitesymbolic meaning. This is the essence of folk art. Eventhough the semantics of the many ornamentationmotifs had already been forgotten in the nineteenthcentury, the folk artists intuitively did as their an-cestors had done. In this way, the continuity of tradi-tional artistry and artistic thought was preserved.

Unfortunately, many transitions introduced by theSoviet system and, particularly, the mandatory board-ing schools (intematy) for Native students tore childrenfrom their parents and accustomed environment, andchanged peoples' lives. The centuries-old system ofaural-visual transmission of crafts and knowledge fromgeneration to generation was destroyed. This break inthe transmission of tradition led to the disappearanceof some forms of folk art and to the artificial mutationof others. At the same time, as the continuity in trans-

mission of tradition was destroyed, the informationalboom caused great harm to folk art. It facilitated theintroduction of many foreign elements into Native art(such as materials, technology, ornamental motifs, etc.),which, in turn, undermined traditional culture from within.This is directly evident in the case of Even and Evenkculture, whereas the Yukagirare in danger of completelydisappearing as a culturally distinctive group.

Here we cite the story of the Berezov group ofEven who managed to maintain until very recently aspecial, unique oasis of traditional language and cul-ture. This group of nomadic reindeer Even remainedfully isolated until the mid-1950s, when they werediscovered by the Soviet security services and re-incorporated into the highly regulated life of the YakutRepublic. Due to decades of deliberate isolation, theBerezov Even, unlike other groups of Even in Yakutia,had preserved their language and traditional culture.One of the authors (V. I-U.) visited the village of Berezovka—to which these people had been relocated—in thelate 1980s. Communication with several elder womenof the village had to be through an interpreter becausethey knew neither Russian nor Yakut. In this they differfrom other indigenous people of northern Yakutia (SakhaRepublic) who commonly prefer to speak Russian orYakut rather than their own language.

The relation to language and culture today can beassessed from a survey conducted by the second co-author [Z.I.] in two northern districts (ulus) of the SakhaRepublic, the Srednekolymskii (Middle Kolyma), andNizhnekolymskii (Lower Kolyma), in March 1997. Sevenadults who consider themselves Native artists com-pleted the survey, as did fifty-three high-school stu-dents in grades 8 to 10. In Berezovka, the village vis-ited by Vladimir Ivanov-Unarov ten years earlier, theolder women still speak primarily their native Evenlanguage; but now they also know a little Russian anda little Yakut. They live sedentary lives and raise thechildren in the family. Sewing and decorative traditionshave been handed down from the older generation,but some women think them outdated and therefore

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do not concern themselves with teaching the childrenthese handicrafts. Thirteen- and fourteen-year old Evenchildren speak Russian at school and Even at home.Only one of the girls in the survey reported that she islearning Native sewing skills from her grandmother.

Once again, it was the artificial isolation of theBerezov Even that helped them preserve their tradi-tional decorative art. Unfortunately, a tendency towardinnovation and a desire to satisfy the tastes of audi-ences at folk-art exhibits, who are delighted withabundant bright beads and color, will soon lead tothe use of quantity decor in their work.

Tundra Yukagir made up the majority of thepopulation in the Lower Kolyma area at Jochelson'stime (1895-1902). Today, of the twenty-five thirteento fifteen year-old students surveyed in local schoolsin the towns of Cherski, Andriushkino, and Kolymskoe,only four considered themselves Yukagir, and two ofthem have Russian fathers. They do not know theirnative language and speak only Russian. They all havenegative attitudes toward the traditional culture ofhandicrafts.

Nevertheless, since the mid-1980s there has beenan intensive growth in ethnic consciousness amongmany peoples of Russia, including the indigenous smallnations of the Russian North. Native intellectuals, in-cluding professional writers and artists are among thoseleading the movement for the preservation and revivalof ethnic culture.

During the Soviet period the loss of Native culturesdid not proceed at the same rate among all the groups.Thus, the Sakha people, who were the majority popu-lation in Yakutia until the 1960s, were granted a cer-tain limited level of administrative autonomy in theearly 1 930s. For the most part they preserved theirlanguage and some of the traditional features of theirway of life. Today, in comparison with other Nativenations of the Sakha Republic, the Sakha people havebeen quite successful in reviving their cultural legacy.The popular festival ysyakh was revived and has cometo be a focus of ethnic cultural life, including songs.

dances, games, clothing, ceremonial dinnerware andutensils, decorations and foods. Related forms of folkart are correspondingly beginning to be revived.

Traces of the old customs have been presepv/edsomewhere deep in people's memory. For several de-cades it seemed as if shamanism had long been cutout of the lives of Siberian peoples. In recent years,however, shamans have reappeared in Yakutia as wellas numerous psychic healers who fill the role that sha-mans once filled. Moreover, it appears that active sha-mans still practice among the isolated, migratorygroups of the Evenk in southern Yakutia, continuing tofulfil their traditional functions as protectors of the clan,soothsayers, and healers.

Today, in the Republic of Sakha there is an offi-cially recognized Association for Traditional Medicine,headed by the contemporary Sakha shaman, VladimirKondakov, and a Center for Traditional Medicine whosedoctors have medical training and also know tradi-tional folk methods of healing.

We cite another example. During the 1 980s, manystudents in Yakut folklore were talking about the fad-ing out of the storytelling tradition among the Sakhapeople. At that time there remained only a few elderswho were accomplished at improvisational storytelling.In the past few years, however, as a result of the in-creased interest in folklore and the growth in ethnicconsciousness, the situation has changed dramaticallyas if some hidden resources were emerging from deepin Native memory. There are young people and evenchildren with the gift of performing traditional epic folktales. Many people have stepped forward to performvarious old rituals and half-forgotten practices that de-mand great improvisational competence.

In Yakutia today much effort is being put into therevival and preservation of the culture of the Nativepeople. There is emphasis on the development of songand dance traditions and all forms of professional art.A special presidential program supports talented youngpeople who tour all over the world winning honorsand awards. The so-called Academy of Spirituality was

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established in 1997 by a decree issued by MikhailNikolaev, then the President of the Sakha Republic. Manyprofessional artists, writers, performers, composers, andeven the local bishop of the Russian Orthodox Church,have become members of the Academy. However,not one representative of the traditional folk culture orpractitioner of the traditional religion is a member. Sev-eral Centers for Folk Art have been established, andthere have been many conferences on Sakha religion;however, these have neither official acceptance noradequate financial support. But at least they have notbeen banned.

All the same, the obstacles on the path to culturalrevival are mounting. Alongside the economic hard-ships produced by the general social-economic break-down in Russia, there are also the difficulties connectedwith the loss of cultural continuity. Efforts to reviveNative decorative arts are stalled because many con-temporary artisans no longer know the traditional skillsand have lost cultural information related to the oldpractices. In 1996, at a seminar for Native folk artisansand seamstresses in the town of Srednekolymsk innortheastern Yakutia, we witnessed the tremendousinterest that exists in the recovery of the lost tradi-tions. It seemed that many modern artisans do notknow the traditional techniques and technologies ofworking with fur and leather, of sewing and decorat-ing ethnic dresses. They use eclectic, quirky decora-tive motifs. The seminar participants thus were veryexcited to see the slides we made at the AmericanMuseum in New York of traditional objects from theJNPE Jochelson's collection.

The Present-Day Value of the JNPE SiberianCollections

The Siberian collections of the Jesup Expedition arenow the most priceless resource for the traditional artand crafts of the Native people of northeast Siberiawho have suffered enormous cultural losses during thetwentieth century. Since our research at the AmericanMuseum of Natural History, we have frequently had

occasion to speak of the Jesup Expedition collectionon the media and at the various meetings with folkartisans. These conversations strengthened our con-viction that the knowledge of this collection is ofcritical importance today for the bearers of the cul-tures represented in the Jesup Expedition collection.

The case of the artisan mentioned above, AnastasiaSivtseva, is a good example. Several pieces of her art-works and fur clothing have been acquired recently bythe AMNH. After seeing pictures of traditional eaglerobes in the Jesup Expedition collection, she acknowl-edged that she neither visualized nor made the "furrobe with eagle" properly. Another artisan, AnnaNikolaeva, sewed a buuktaakh son coat following acopy of Jochelson's photograph, "Yakut Woman in FeastDress" (AMNH, # 70/7314 and 70/7318,181 8-9; Figs.98 and 99). She also made a beautiful birch barkcontainer after Jochelson's "Birch Bark" (AMNH # 70/8862; Fig. 100).

In a recent performance of the Yakut nationalopera Nyurgun Bootur, the main characters weredressed in national clothing made by the costume de-signer Lena Gogoleva. The styles she used for coatsand ornaments were based on the photos and draw-ings we had made of objects in Jochelson's collectionat the AMNH (Fig. 101). Unfortunately, since there wereno good quality slides and photographs available forthe Yukagir and Even artifacts, we were unable to gen-erate the same amount of interest in these objects orto make them as widely known.

It is to be hoped that Bogoras' and Jochelson'smonumental monographs in the Jesup Expeditionseries. The Chukchee, The Koryak, and The Yukaghirand the Yukaghihzed Tungus\N\\\ become available infull translation for a Russian-speaking audience, includ-ing the Native peoples of Russia. Bogoras' The Chukchiand Jochelson's The Koryak were already reprinted inRussian (Bogoras 1991; Jochelson 1997), although notin their original JNPE format and in small print. In 1996we were commissioned by the Institute on Problemsof Northern Peoples in Yakutsk to translate another

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Jochelson's JNPE monograph, The Yukaghirs and theYukaghirized Tungus Oochelson 1926). The translationwas done with help from a grant from the MacArthurFoundation, but publication is still pending.*^ This is,indeed, a unique and so far the only major source onYukagir traditional ethnography, social life, family rela-tions, and spiritual and material culture. It is especiallysignificant that this book was written on the basis ofalmost four years of personal observations among theYukagir, at a time when their language and many oftheir traditions were still alive. Yukagir poet and phi-lologist, Cavril Kurilov, wrote a special Foreword tothis modern translation of Jochelson's famous book,and his brother, the artist Nikolai Kurilov, redrew theoriginal drawings. Both of the Kurilov brothers arehighly respected cultural leaders of the modernYukagir nation. They believe they are descendantsof the shaman Somon, whom Jochelson met on histrip and named Shomonov (Shamanov) in Russiantranscription.

In our translation we maintained all of Jochelson'soriginal text, only adding several contemporary notesand corrections in the Footnotes section. Unfortunately,because of the long time between the recording ofhis Yukagir field data (in 1895-6 and 1901-2) and thefinal preparation of his monograph for the JNPE series(published in 1926), Jochelson allowed a few errors inattribution of some artifacts to slip in. For example, afew Even objects were identified as Yukagir. SergeiIvanov later used these incorrect attributions in gener-alizations about the special characteristics of Yukagirornamentation in his monograph on the ornamenta-tion styles of the Native people of Siberia (Ivanov 1963).These were recycled in the recently published mono-graph, Odezhda yukagirov {C\oth\r\g of the Yukagir) byL. Zhukova.

It would also be of great value to bring the copiesof the original Jochelson's photographs and an excel-lent photo exhibit. Drawing Shadows to Stone, to Yakutia.This exhibit was produced by the AMNH curatorsfor the opening of the conference dedicated to the

Centenary of the Jesup North Pacific Expedition inNew York (Kendall et al. 1 997). In the winter of 1 998a conference was held in Yakutsk on the occasionof the national festival Ysyakh. At this conference,we showed Jochelson's photograph of the Ysyakhopening ceremony in May 1902 in the village ofChurapcha (see Kendall et al. 1 997:91-2, Fig. 11 3).This photo from the AMNH collection was kindlygiven to us by Thomas Miller, one of the organizersof the Drawing Shadows to Stone Exhibit. Jochelson'sphoto attracted great interest because it was taken100 years ago when the Ysyakh festival was still aliving tradition and not a yearly festival with inventedand staged performances. This photo and severalof Jochelson's other Jesup pictures, along with ourcomments and a brief story of the Jesup Expedition,were reproduced recently by the Yakutsk-basedJournal Ilin (Ivanov-Unarov and Ivanova 1 998).

The importance of the Jesup Expedition's ethno-graphic collections is that it represents the classiclegacy of the traditional cultures of the Sakha,Koryak, Chukchi, Even, Evenk, and Yukagir peoples.The Yakutsk-based Institute on Problems of North-ern Peoples of the Russian Academy of Sciencesrecently initiated an international research and pub-lication program entitled Circumpolar Culture of thePeoples of the Arctic and North: Monuments of Cul-ture of the Peoples of the Arctic. The goal of thisproject is to lay the groundwork for a series of ba-sic encyclopedia-style volumes on each of the Na-tive peoples of the North and the Arctic. The AMNHJesup Expedition collections can make an invaluablecontribution to this project. For this reason, projectoutlines include the publication of summary cata-logs of the JNPE collections on each nation of Siberia,with photographs and detailed description of theobjects. Once published locally, in Yakutsk and inRussian, these catalogs would constitute a crucialcontribution to the revival of the cultures of the in-digenous peoples of Siberia once depicted by theJesup Expedition.

V. IVANOV-UNAROV AND Z. IVANOVA UNAROVA

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Acknowledgments

We would like to express our gratitude to the SorosFoundation for enabling us to study the collection ofthe Jesup Expedition in New York in 1992. Specialthanks go to the many people on the AMNH staff:Laurel Kendall, curator of the Asian Ethnographic Col-lections; Thomas Miller, former Scientific Assistant; AnnWright-Parsons, Senior Scientific Assistant; Belinda Kay,former head of the American Museum's archives; NinaRoot, former head of the AMNH Library; and ThomasBaione, who generously helped us with photographsfor the Russian translation of Jochelson's monograph(1926). With their help we were able to study in depththe AMNH Siberian collection, to familiarize ourselveswith the archives and photographic records, and toamass the necessary sources and illustrations for aRussian translation of Jochelson's monograph—all intwo months. We are especially thankful to MarjorieMandelstam Balzerand Harley Balzerfrom GeorgetownUniversity, whose friendship comforted us duringour visit in America. We are also very grateful to theMacArthur Foundation for a grant to our home Insti-tute on Problems of Northern Peoples in Yakutsk forthe translation of Jochelson's JNPE monograph. TheYukaghirs and the Yukaghirized Tungus (1926). IgorKrupnik provided critical assistance in the final editingof this paper and in our often arduous communicationwith our colleagues and conference organizers in theU.S. David Koester who translated this paper deservesour final thanks.

Notes

1. Boas to Jochelson, 28 October 1898 (AMNH-DA, Jochelson's collection. Box A). In this letterBoas suggested to Jochelson that he arrived inNew York by February 1, 1899, in order to re-ceive fieldwork instructions. He was then to headfor the northern shore of the Sea of Okhotsk inthe spring of 1899 to study the Koryak. Accord-ing to preliminary plans, he was to take the sum-mer of 1899 to the end of winter 1900 for thesurvey of the Koryak, adding a short visit to the

eastern Yukagir (see copy of the letter in Vakhtin2001:81).

2. Boas to Jochelson, 5 December 1898, AMNH-DA. This correspondence is now published inVakhtin 2001:80-2.

3. Bogoras and Jochelson to Boas, 30 October1899, AMNH-DA. See Vakhtin 2001:84-5.

4. Jesup to Jochelson, March 24 1900, AMNH-DA.

5. In his description of ancient Yakut clothing,Bolo writes that "[l]n ancient times Yakut robeswere 'tangalaidaakh son', onoolookh son', buuktaakhson', and 'buurukteekh son', but in addition to these,according to some legends, there was also'khotoidookh son.'" (Bolo 1994:94).

6. Jochelson to Boas, 27 November 1902,AMNH-DA, Jochelson collection, Box A.

7. "We also made a very successful trip by seain two boats to the mouth of the Najachan river,where we found a Tungus camp of 61 tents. Itwas a great opportunity for ethnographic work,unfortunately I couldn't stay long. The ethnologi-cal collection is now 1 440 artifacts (including 1 73from the Tungus)." Jochelson to Boas, 21 July-3August 1 901. AMNH-DA, Jochelson collection, BoxA.

8. As of winter 2003, this manuscript remainedunpublished, due to the minuscule budgets oftoday's academic institutions and presses in theSakha Republic and to the shortage of funds frompotential sponsors.

ReferencesBoas, Franz

1 903 The Jesup North Pacific Expedition. AmericanMuseum Journal 3{5y.7 2-] 19.

1 905 The Jesup North Pacific Expedition. In Interna-tional Congress of Americanists, 13th Session, Held inNew York in 1902. Pp.91-100. Easton, PA:Eschenbach.

Bogoras, Waldemar

1 904-9 TheChukchee. The Jesup North Pacific Expedi-tion, vol. 7, pts. 1-3. Memoirs of the American Mu-seum of Natural History, 1 1. Leiden: EJ. Brill; NewYork: G.E. Stechert.

1991 Material'naia kul'tura chukchei(Yhe Chukchi. Ma-terial Culture). Moscow and Leningrad: Nauka Pub-lishers [Translation of Bogoras 1904, pt.l].

Cole, Douglas

2001 The Greatest Thing Undertaken by Any Mu-seum? Franz Boas, Morris Jesup, and the Jesup North

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Pacific Expedition. In Gateways. Exploring the Legacyof the jesup North Pacific Expedition, 1897- / 902. IgorKrupnik and William W. Fitzhugh, eds. Pp. 29-70. Con-tributions to Circumpolar Anthropology 1. Washing-ton, DC: Arctic Studies Center.

Freed, Stanley A., Ruth S. Freed, and Laila

Williamson

1 988a Capitalist Philanthropy and Russian Revolution-aries: The Jesup North Pacific Expedition (1897-1902). American Anthropologist 900y.7-24.

1 988b The American Museum's Jesup North PacificExpedition. In Crossroads of Continents. Cultures ofSiberia and Alaska. William W. Fitzhugh and AronCrowell, eds. Pp.97-104. Washington, DC:Smithsonian Institution.

Ivanov, Sergei V.

1963 Ornament narodov Sibiri kak istoricheskiiistochnik (po materialam XlX-nachala XX v.). NarodySibiri i Dal'nego Vostoka (Ornamentation of thePeoples of Siberia as a Historical Resource (Basedupon the Data from the 1800s and the Early 1 900s).Peoples of Siberia and the Far East. Trudy Institutaetnografii Akademii Nauk SSSR, 81. Moscow andLeningrad.

ivanov-Unarov, Vladimir Kh., and Zinaida I.Ivanova

1 998 O predystorii snimkovJochelsona (On the His-tory of Jochelson's Photographs). Ilin 1(2): 53-4.Yakutsk.

Jochelson, Waldemar (lokhel'son, Vladimir I.)

1 900 Materialy po izucheniiu yukagirskogo iazyka ifol'klora, sobrannye v Kolymskom okruge (Materialsto the Study of the Yukagir Language and FolkloreCollected in the Kolyma District). St. Petersburg.

1908 The Koryak. The Jesup North Pacific Expedition,vol. 6, pts. 1 -2. Memoirs of the American Museum ofNatural History, 10. Leiden: EJ. Brill; New York: G.E.Stechert.

1 926 The Yukaghir and the Yukaghirized Tungus.The Jesup North Pacific Expedition, vol. 9, pts. 1-3.Memoirs of the American Museum of Natural History,1 3. Leiden: E.J. Brill; New York: G.E. Stechert.

1933 The Yakut. Anthropological Papers of the Ameri-can Museum of Natural History, 32(2). New York

1997 Koriaki. Material'naia kul'tura i sotsial'naiaorganizatsiia(Jhe Koryak. Material Culture and SocialOrganization). St. Petersburg: Nauka Publishers [Trans-lation of Jochelson 1908, pt.2].

Kendall, Laurel, Barbara Mathe, and Thomas R.

Miller, eds.

1997 Drawing Shadows to Stone. The Photography ofthe Jesup North Pacific Expedition, 1897-1902. NewYork: American Museum of Natural History; Seattleand London: University of Washington Press.

Kulakovskii, Alexei.E.

1 979 Nauchnye rrwc/^lAcademic Writings). Yakutsk:

Yakutskoe knizhnoe izdatel'stvo.Sehen Boio

1994 The History of the Yakut Nation Before the Ar-rival of the Russians to the Lena River. Yakutsk (inSakha language).

Shavrov, K.B.

1935 V.I. lokhelson (WaldemarJochelson). Sovetskaia

etnografia 2:3-] 3. Leningrad.Vakhtin, Nikolai B.

2001 Franz Boas and the Shaping of the Jesup Ex-pedition Siberian Research, 1895-1900. In Gateways.Exploring the Legacy of the Jesup North Pacific Expedi-tion, 1897-1902. Igor Krupnik and William W. Fitzhugh,eds. Pp. 71-89. Contributions to Circumpolar Anthro-pology 1. Washington, DC: Arctic Studies Center.

Zykov, F.M.

1993 Yakutskii belepchh ego etnograficheskie paralleli(The Yakut Belepchiand Its Ethnographic Parallels). InEtnicheskaia istoria narodov iuzhnoi Sibiri i TsentralnoiAzii. Pp. 263-9. Novosibirsk: Nauka Publishers.

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/14/ Susan Point, Spindle Whorl, 1994. Vancouver International Airport, Vancouver, BC. Photograph courtesySusan Point and Bill McLennan.

348

The Invention and Terpetuation of Culture

~y~Ke ^oasian [ egactj and | wo ZOth Centurtj Woman ~l otem fole CLarvers

ALDONA JONAITIS

In 1898 Harlan Smith collected house posts fromthe Musqueam reserve in Vancouver, British Colum-bia (Fig. 102). Like other British Columbia artifactsfrom the Jesup North Pacific Expedition, they be-came part of the American Museum of NaturalHistory's vast Northwest Coast collections.' In 1997,the University of British Columbia's Museum of An-thropology asked Salish artist Susan Point (born1952) to carve two new Salish house posts basedon those collected one hundred years earlier. In keep-ing with the secretive nature of specific family pre-rogatives to which she had no right. Point was care-ful not to copy the AMNH models exactly but in-stead drew inspiration from them to create two newSalish fourteen-foot house posts (Fig. 103) with theirown unique original power (McLellan 2000:94-7).But unlike the originals, which had been once erectedwithin the Musqueam house, these were exteriorpublic sculptures that stood on the Museum ground,among totem poles from other Northwest CoastFirst Nations.^

Most monumental Northwest Coast art was, andcontinues to be, made by men. Women usually makebaskets, textiles, leatherwork and beadwork. Point'screations, and those of another Native woman artist,Kwakwakalwakw Ellen Neel (1916-66), challengethis gender-based labor division by carving theiconic Northwest Coast sculpture - the totem pole.And, beyond that, their artworks contest some basicprinciples that have governed aboriginal art studiessince the time of Franz Boas.

As Boas's life-time project was to understand pre-contact Northwest Coast culture, he sought the mostunacculturated artifacts. Only items that we might char-acterize as embodying timeless traditionalism wereconsidered worthy of collecting and study. Thoseemerging from the colonial encounter were to be dis-regarded, as products of a new, polluted tradition. Toanalyze culture historically. Boas tried to identify in-ventors of a traditional element, like the totem pole,and reconstruct its historic diffusion over time and ge-ography. In his view, certain creative groups such asthe Kwakwaka'wakw and Haida stood at the centerand others, like the "imitative" Coast Salish lan-guished at the margin. The essentialist premise un-derlying this approach has characterized much dis-course on Northwest Coast cultures and art, in whichtypes are real, but variations on those types arejudged peripheral, derivative and imperfect.^ The "es-sential" totem pole is that which is fixed in the con-temporary imagination as what a totem pole shouldbe: a tall, freestanding column developed during theGolden Age of cultural purity. As abundant anthro-pological analyses have demonstrated, essentialismand timeless traditionalism disregards the dynamicnature of cultural interactions.

A typical sightseer who enjoys being photo-graphed next to a totem pole in a Vancouver, Victoriaor Seattle park likely believes the carving to be an-cient, and, if clearly new, the representative of an an-cient tradition widespread across the Northwest Coast."In reality, few poles existed at first contact, and then,

349

probably, only among the Haida. They became morenumerous and larger as new wealth from the fur tradenecessitated more impressive expressions of statusand metal tools enabled taller poles to be carved morequickly. From the one or two poles observed in HaidaCwaii (Queen Charlotte Islands) communities in the1 790s, totem poles proliferated so, by the mid-nine-teenth century, these villages became forests of to-tem poles (Fig. 104). During the nineteenth century,the totem pole concept spread to the mainland ofBritish Columbia, inspiring first the Tsimshian and onlyat the end of the century the Kwakwaka'wakw (Fig.105). Totem poles were popular in the southernmostpart of the Alaska panhandle, but the northern Tlingitdisdainfully dismissed them as "foreign." And exteriorpoles never became part of the Coast Salish artisticrepertoire at all. Totem pole carving ceased amongthe Haida, Tsimshian and Tlingit by the late nineteenthcentury, but a few communities among the Kwak-waka'wakw, Nuu-chah-nulth and Citksan continuedmaking poles for their own purposes into the twen-tieth century Qonaitis 1999:106-1 10).

Beginning in the late nineteenth century, the non-Native Euro-American public became familiar withtotem poles at world's fairs like the Chicago WorldColumbian Exposition, in museums such as the Ameri-can Museum of Natural History's North Pacific IndianHall, and along the popular Alaska Inside Passagesteamer routes.^ Although many poles standing in mu-seum galleries are nineteenth century carvings removedfrom their original villages, most poles seen today inparks, along roads and outside buildings are the re-sults of programs conceptualized and managed bymuseums, governmental agencies and private organi-zations that hired carvers to restore, copy or carveoriginal poles. Only during the past two decades haveFirst Nation communities themselves raised new poleson their own lands.

Boas had large quantities of Northwest Coast ma-terial culture collected during the Jesup North PacificExpedition, including totem poles. Many objects from

the Jesup Expedition collections appear as illustrationsin his various art publications, including his major Primi-tive An, first published in 1 927,' Better known for hisparadigm-shifting anthropological writings and impres-sive competence in ethnology, linguistics, folklore andphysical anthropology, Boas made significant contri-butions to scholarship on aboriginal art including hisgroundbreaking study of the formal and iconographiccomponents of Northwest Coast art and speculationson the history of the Northwest Coast totem pole.

Boas found totem poles interesting as objectswhich could be subjected to historic analysis. In 1888,shortly after this first visit to Vancouver Island, Boassuggested that:

I am inclined to believe that another customof the North West Americans besides theirdances originated among the Kwakiutl. Imean the use of heraldic columns. This viewmay seem unjustified, considering the factthat such columns are made nowhere withgreater care than in the northern regions,among the Tsimshian and Haida, and farthernorth and south they are less frequent andless elaborately carved. The Haida, however,frequently took up foreign ideas with greatenergy, and developed them independently...It appears that the tribe has a remarkablefaculty of adaptation (Boas 1888:195).

Boas ascribed to the Kwakwaka'wakw, then as nowclinging tenaciously to their traditions, the honor ofinventing the totem pole, and suggested that theHaida, who by that time appeared thoroughly ac-culturated, had simply adopted the idea and elabo-rated upon it. Later, as a result of a far more carefulhistorical reconstruction of the region, Boas modi-fied his thesis of Northwest Coast cultural develop-ment in Primitive Art (Boas 1 955; first published 1927)and gave the Haida, Tlingit and Tsimshian credit fororiginating the elaborate symbolic style which diffusednorth and south. Despite Boas' early inaccurate read-ing of history, his premise that one group inventedpoles that then spread to other groups signaled a newhistorical consciousness that would pervade subse-quent studies of the totem pole. Of course, this history

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did not cease at contact, and late eighteenth centuryHaida carvings, early twentieth century Kwakwa-ka'wakw monuments, innovative creations by mod-ern artists like Ellen Neel and Susan Point, and the to-tem poles of future generations all represent productsof intellectual and material exchange that contributeto the ongoing "invention" of culture. Those exchanges,moreover, were not only among First Nations peoplebut also between the original Northwest Coast resi-dents and their colonizers.

Ellen Neel

In Primitive Art, Boas asserted that "It is not safe tobase our arguments [on Northwest Coast art history]on models or on objects made for the trade," of whichabundant examples were at that time in circulation. "Ishall use, therefore, exclusively, older specimens whichhave been in use" (Boas 1955:209). Such disinterest inthe modernization of First Nations people precludedBoas from understanding the wealth of meaning em-bodied in commodified art such as model totem polesmade expressly for the tourist market.^ These are notbastardizations of authenticity, nor the pathetic worksof a shattered people completely dominated by theircolonizers. Chris Cosden and Chantal Knowles state inthe introduction to their study on colonialism in NewGuinea:

Chemists make a distinction between amixture and a reaction. A mixture is asolution in which different chemicals com-bine, but retain their original form, whereas areaction creates something new out of itsoriginal constituent parts. Colonial NewGuinea was a reaction to which all partiescontributed, so that there can be no ques-tion that all had influence and agency.(Gosden and Knowles 2001 :xix).

An important concept here is agency, the power of anindividual or group to affect its own destiny. Going onto criticize those who insist on an essentialist conceptof culture, Gosden and Knowles assert that "Anthro-pologists have tried to undo or ignore the reactionand focus upon one part. New Guineans, creating a

partial and static picture in the process." The modeltotem pole that Boas rejected as an unacceptable cul-tural "mixture" was in reality a "reaction" replete withagency.

One of the most well regarded mid-twentieth cen-tury model totem pole maker was Ellen Neel (1916-1966), a Kwakwaka'wakw carver from northernVancouver Island (Fig. 106). Neel's well-known artistgrandfather, Charlie James (1867-1938) taught theyoung girl how to carve and by her teenage years, shewas selling model poles to visitors in her native AlertBay. In 1943, Neel married, moved from Alert Bay toVancouver, and in 1946, began carving and sellingmodel poles to help support her family. With the assis-tance of her six children, Neel produced numerous small,modestly priced models to sell to department storesand souvenir shops. In 1948, the City of VancouverBoard of Parks Commissioners permitted her to carve,display, and sell her works in an abandoned militarybuilding in Stanley Park. She gradually became moreand more well known for both her model poles andfull-size carvings, including a sixteen foot pole whichNeel and her husband donated to the Alma Mater So-ciety of the University of British Columbia (UBC) and alarge pole for the Pacific National Exhibition, an annualfair.9

Tourism is deeply implicated in the history oftotem poles, for as early as the 1880s, steamship com-panies beckoned prospective clients with descriptionsof the abundant poles they would see on their InsidePassage cruise. Recognizing the value of poles for tour-ism, a group of British Columbians along with the-thenVancouver Mayor Charles Thompson formed an asso-ciation and formally adopted the name "Totemland"to trademark the province, promote tourism, andencourage the use of totem poles on license plates,stamps and, especially, advertisements. So receptivewas the community that a local newspaper wroteoptimistically, "The BC totem may become as famousas the Idaho potato" (K. Phillips 2000:1). The goals ofthis group were published as follows:

A. JONAITIS

To collect in writing and disseminate thelegendary history, customs and philosophyof our native Indians; also to encourage andpreserve their ancient weaving, painting andsculptural arts; to promote the use of aThunderbird Totem and the sloganTotemland as the symbol of the colour andromantic interest of the British ColumbiaIndian together with their singulartotemology and unique wood-carving art; toadvise, encourage and support the BritishColumbia Indians in overcoming obstaclesthat may stand in the way of their attain-ment to the enjoyment of full citizenship (K.Phillips 2000:25).

The Totemland Society asked Ellen Neel to design themodel pole which would become its official emblem(Fig. 108).

Neel created a unique two foot pole for that orga-nization. A thunderbird sits on atop an egg-shapedglobe prominently depicting western British Columbiawith Vancouver Island, and a human figure kneels un-derneath. In creating this pole, Neel integrated sym-bols and sculptural forms from her own heritage witha distinctly western geographical representation. Un-derstanding the non-Native desire to know the "story"of any pole, Neel explained its iconography as a narra-tive of the thunderbird giving British Columbia to thefirst man. Neel herself reproduced this vividly painted,highly original pole a number of times as gifts, whileher popular image of Totemland appeared on societyletterhead, scarves, T-shirts, ties, and a Royal Albertchina dinner service.

One could judge this pole as a "degradation" ofa treasured aboriginal artistic tradition appropriatedby the colonialist class — but that would be wrong.As her friend Phil Nuytten (1982:47) commented,Neel, who never took herself too seriously anyway,"laughed a lot about the Totemland Poles." Accord-ing to Nuytten (personal communication 2003) Neel'sartist uncle Mungo Martin half-seriously, half-jestinglyreferred to it as a "white man's pole" but then agreedwith his niece that "a white person wouldn't knowthe difference anyway," and they both laughed.

Perhaps Neel recognized the underlying fatuous-ness of this commission — or at the very least its silli-ness. But a serious message underlies this artwork aswell, for the globe on the Totemland Society's poledepicts only Vancouver Island and the nearby main-land, not even the entire totem pole region of BritishColumbia. In the middle is Kwakwaka'wakw territory,situating Neel's own tribal land at the center of theworld (Phillips 2000:69-70). Nuytten (personal com-munication 2003) also points out that the human un-derneath the globe has a uncanny resemblance to theEuropean concept of Atlas with the world on his shoul-ders; Neel seems to have appropriated a non-Nativeconcept and transformed it into a very Kwak-waka'wakw-like image. Every official who proudlydisplayed this pole, every T-shirt emblazoned with itsimage, every piece of Totemland china declared, to alargely white audience who may very well not haveunderstood, the fundamental centrality of theKwakwaka'wakw, their traditional ownership of thisland, and their new ownership of a European symbol.

Ellen Neel was certainly a major mid-century Na-tive artist, admired by her contemporaries. However,since her death in 1966, she has effectively vanishedfrom the discourse on Northwest Coast art. An epi-sode in totem pole history may provide insights intowhy that might be. Two versions exist of the story ofUniversity of British Columbia's efforts to have severalof their Northwest Coast totem poles restored. Ac-cording to Phil Nuytten (1982:9-10, 52-53), the UBCsTotem Pole Committee approached Neel first, askingher to restore fifteen poles. This collection had specialmeaning for Neel, as one had been carved by her grand-father Charlie James, and another by her relative MungoMartin. During that summer Neel restored four polesfrom Fort Rupert, including James'. Because her busi-ness had suffered during her absence and as a creativeartist, she found replication uninspiring, Neel sug-gested that the next summer the Museum of Anthro-pology hire her uncle, Mungo Martin, for this job—which they did (Fig. 107). Audrey Hawthorn, wife of

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Harry Hawthorn, Director of the Museum of Anthro-pology from 1947-1974, offers an somewhat differ-ent account of Martin's hire, stating that he had beenselected from the very beginning, and that the Mu-seum had also approached Neel to be his assistant;"she was not, however, in a position to assist Mr. Mar-tin on restoration work at that time" (Hawthorn 1993:9-10). With those words. Hawthorn effectively erasesNeel's contributions to the Museum of Anthropologytotem pole restoration project.

The museum, with a clear vision of its general rolein cultural preservation as well as this project's historicsignificance, played a major role in overseeing the ac-tual restorations. Such conscious attempt to recreatethe past provided opportunities for museum anthro-pologists to appear as "cultural saviors." Harry Haw-thorn directed Martin "to return to the style of the firstphase of contact, using steel tools but painting spar-ingly," so, Martin abandoned his customary coveringof bright paint (which his Kwakwaka'wakw custom-ers apparently liked) and colored only certain fea-tures. In a pamphlet explaining Martin's work in1952 replicating poles in Victoria's Thunderbird Park,anthropologist Wilson Duff asserted that by remain-ing outside in the park, the old poles would havesoon decayed:

It was decided to obtain skilled Indiancarvers to carve exact copies of the best oldpoles, and some new ones, to replace theold exhibits and produce a permanent andrepresentative outdoor display of this uniqueart for the benefit of future generations. Byemploying native craftsmen and having themwork in public view in the park, heprogramme accomplished the added aims ofkeeping alive native art and providing apublic educational attraction (Duff n.d.:29).

It was thus the museum, not Natives, who "kept theculture alive" by hiring an authentic Indian, MungoMartin, "one of the few surviving authorities in the oldways of life" (Duff n.d.:29). Despite his rudimentaryEnglish the highly personable Martin, along with hisequally charming wife Abayah, became extremely

popular with visitors to both the Museum of Anthro-pology and the British Columbia Provincial Museum,now known as the Royal British Columbia Museum.Mungo Martin, conforming beautifully to the "Vanish-ing Indian" myth which harmonized nicely with the mythof the totem pole as an ancient tradition on the vergeof disappearance, became the most well known andhighly regarded Northwest Coast Native of his time(Class 2000).

Ellen Neel never became a significant player in theofficial history of British Columbia's totem pole projects,perhaps because, unlike Martin, she did not adhere tothe timeless traditionalist stereotype favored by an-thropologists and the public. Indeed, Neel was one ofthe first Natives to actually challenge the disappearingIndian trope to which Duff so compellingly refers. At a1948 conference on Native art and culture, Neel dis-missed the concept that Native art is dead, calling it"one of the great fallacies where the art of my peopleis concerned." She continued "For if our art is dead,then it is fit only to be mummified, packed into mortu-ary boxes and tucked away into museums... Whereasto me, it is a living symbol of gaiety, the laughter andlove of color of my people." Innovation and changehad always been aspects of her artistic tradition. It isstriking that, in contrast to Harry Hawthorn's instruc-tion to reduce the amount of color for historical verisi-militude, Neel and the contemporary Kwakwaka'wakw"love" color. She pointed to the national identity inher-ent in her work: "Our art continues to live, for not onlyis it part and parcel of us, but can be a powerful factorin combining the best part of Indian culture into thefabric of a truly Canadian art form" (Nuytten 1982:50).

Neel spoke good English and instead of wearingceremonial regalia, even at events, dressed in clothesmore appropriate for a 1950s housewife. Moreover,by marrying a white man, she lost her Indian statusaccording to Canadian law. Instead of purporting her-self like Martin as a high status aboriginal, she pre-sented herself as Mother, supervising her six half-Na-tive cildren as totem pole apprentices. Her art, while

A. JONAITIS

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capable of being quite traditional, also at times ven-tured into the unexpected, as in the Totemland pole.Ellen Nee! did not make poles that alluded to the goldenage of authenticity, did not fit nicely into the categoryof "disappearing Indian" so favored by the museums,and despite her lineage, did not go down in history asa truly "authentic" Native.

Today Nee! is rarely mentioned in the literature,and the biography offered in Nuytten's The Totem PoleCarvers{] 982) remains still her only significant source.'°The most important catalogue of contemporary North-west Coast art, The Legacy {\ 980) praises Charlie Jamesand Mungo Martin, but fails to even mention Ellen Neel.Steven Brown, in his survey of Northwest Coast arthistory to the present includes Neel along with eightother male carvers in a list of Kwakwaka'wakw artistsof her generation, but illustrates none of her work(Brown 1998:1 5 5). Just as Hawthorn excluded her fromthe history of the Museum of Anthropology's pole carv-ing projects, the literature has, in effect, erased her fromthe history of Northwest Coast art. In contrast, heruncle Mungo Martin has been transformed into itssuper-star.

Susan Point

A very different reception was given a contemporarywoman artist, Susan Point (born 1952) member of theMusqueam band of Salish (Fig. 110). In 1981, she tooka jewelry-making course at Vancouver Community Col-lege, where she learned to make northern-style silverbracelets and rings. Courses were not offered in Salishart which was not greatly valued at that time. Becauseshe recognized the impressive artistic tradition of herpeople, Point visited museums and began making printsbased upon traditional Salish images. In 1991, shecrafted the first Salish-style monumental carving in de-cades, a twelve-foot house post for the First Nations'House of Learning on the University of British Columbiacampus. Then she embarked upon adventures into newmedia including glass and produced Common Thread,a remarkable seven foot house post of glass depicting

the moon, stars, our planet earth and an assortment ofanimals—wolf, raven, wolverine and sturgeon (Fig. 111).

Unlike Neel, Point has received many accolades.She has had solo exhibits at the Museum of Anthro-pology in Vancouver, Steilacoom Tribal Museum inWashington, and the Canadian Museum of Civilizationin Hull, and has participated in numerous group exhib-its in Canada, the United States, Japan, and Europe. Shewas one of three contemporary Northwest Coast Na-tive artists featured in Indianer Kunstler der WestkusteKanadas {Native Artists from the Northwest Coast), amajor exhibition in Zurich in 1989 (Gerber and Katz-Lahaigue 1989)." And she is the subject of a beautifulcoffee table book published in 2000, thus being oneof the few Northwest Coast artists validated by a per-sonal art monograph (Wyatt 2000). In that cataloguePeter Macnair writes, "more than any other contempo-rary Northwest Coast artist... Point has been success-ful... due to her desire for new challenges, her willing-ness to explore new mediums." As a truly brilliant art-ist, Point deserves every honor bestowed upon her.But as she herself says, "Coast Salish art is relativelyunknown to most people today . . . much of the Na-tive art associated with the Pacific Northwest Coast isfrom principle tribes of northern British Columbia" (Point1996:132-3).

Why was then Salish art unrecognized as a majorart tradition before Susan Point revealed its excellence?Why was so much more such attention paid to morenortherly Northwest Coast art from the Kwak-waka'wakw to Salish? As Wayne Suttles has indicatedon numerous occasions, Franz Boas and his succes-sors created the stereotype of "imitative and passive"Salish as "a pale reflection of the 'real Northwest Coast'to the north" (Suttles 1987:xii; 257).'^

Boas wrote the art section of Teit's Jesup Expedi-tion publication, and in that asserted that the Salishwere "a receptive race, quick to adopt foreign modesof thought," perhaps due to "a low stage of develop-ment of their early culture, or to social conditions unfa-vorable to the continued growth of their own culture"

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(Boas 1900:390,387). He also characterized CoastSalish art as "cruder" than that of the Northern tribes(1900:389). This art became stigmatized as less com-plex, less interesting, and less aesthetically valuablethan either "baroque" Wakashan or elegant northernNorthwest Coast art.'^

Perhaps because family-owned images were con-sidered more private than they were farther north, theSalish carved only interior house posts, never exteriortotem poles.'" But, since tourists to Vancouver—a truecapital of "Totemland"—wanted totem poles, through-out the twentieth century, poles made farther northfilled the city's museums and parks. The art of localSalish was ignored. Before Susan Point began carvingSalish-style monumental art, only one totem pole by aSalish carver, the Thunderbird Dynasty pole stood inVancouver's Stanley Park. In 1936, Squamish ChiefMatthias Joe Capilano made this pole for a group ofVancouver citizens who were planning to erect Haidaand Kwakwaka'wakw poles in Stanley Park, andwanted one made by a local artist. Matthias Joe choseas his model not the minimalist carvings of Salish houseposts, but instead created a Kwakwaka'wakw typeof pole with assertively carved and vividly paintedimages surmounted by an open-winged thunderbird(Fig. 109). Most poles publicly declare the crest privi-leges of an extended family; but this one depictedmythic beings associated with the Salish creation story-thunderbird, its wife, son and daughter, and the seamonster. It also commemorates not a major tribalevent such as a potlatch, a wedding, or the death of achief, but instead the first meeting of Captain Vancouverand the Salish people on June 1 3, 1 792. S.W.A. Gunn,author of the 1965 booklet on Stanley Park poles ap-provingly appraised this pole, which, with thunderbirdimagery communicating the story of the Creation, "com-memorates the meeting of the Indians and the whiteman [which] opened up an entirely new world for both"(Gunn 1965:22-3).

In reality, the Capilano monument represented oneof the first poles that embodied an explicitly political

statement, for what appeared to be celebrating anhistoric event was actually a subtle assertion of ab-original land rights. During the early 1900's, CoastalFirst Nations people had been exceptionally active at-tempting to obtain sovereignty over their land; in 1906,a delegation of Salish chiefs made an unsuccessful tripto London to petition King Edward II to change gov-ernmental policy. In 1912, the Coast Salish, along withthe Nishga, Haida and Interior Salish, joined togetherto form the Allied Tribes of British Columbia to contestthe province's land allocation policies. Squamish chiefAndrew Paul, along with Haida Peter Kelly, labored es-pecially diligently for this, but ultimately to no avail. In1927 the Allied Tribes disbanded, in part due to theirfailure to achieve their goals, and in part due to a newsection of the Indian Act making it illegal to solicitfunds to pursue land claims (Kew 1990:166). In thiscontext of continual rebuffs to their appeals, the 1936Matthias Joe pole served as a quiet, legal mechanismto proclaim Salish rights to the Vancouver region. Thisstatement, like the position of Kwakwaka'wakw terri-tory on Neel's Totemland totem pole, probably wentover the heads of most observers.

In recent years, aboriginal people worldwide havebeen more vociferously defending ownership of theirlands and insisting on more voice in government, edu-cation, and the arts. Australian aborigines. New ZealandMaoris, Scandinavian Saami, Canadian Inuit have all be-come significant forces within their countries. Concomi-tant with these actions of empowerment, Nativepeople have used their artistic traditions to expressidentity, celebrate heritage, and, at times, make politi-cal statements. This was certainly the case on theNorthwest Coast, where the totem pole has assumedyet new meanings as Native Americans and Canadi-ans join in this worldwide movement.

The British North American Act (1867) and the In-dian Act (1876) denied First Nations their sovereigntyand defined them as wards of the state. In keepingwith the national and international aboriginal sover-eignty movements, British Columbia Natives, along with

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other Canadian First Nations sought to win back theirindependence as autonomous units with self-determi-nation in political, social and economic affairs. This wasslow in coming, as only in 1982 did First Nations ap-pear as a category of citizens in the Canadian consti-tution. Its Article 35 now explicitly states, "The exist-ing aboriginal and treaty rights of the aboriginal peoplesof Canada are hereby recognized and confirmed... Inthis Act, 'aboriginal peoples of Canada' includes theIndian, Inuit and Metis peoples of Canada" (quoted inCerber 1988:1 22). Ownership of the land and the rightto control its resources, remain to this day highlycontentious, as British Columbia Natives never signedtreaties with the federal or provincial governmentsfor their land, and have brought their land claims tocourt.

In this contentious political atmosphere, Susan Pointreceived a major commission in the early 1990s tocreate artworks for the International Terminal atVancouver International Airport in Vancouver, BC. Atthe top of the escalator arriving international passen-gers must descend is a monumental, 16-foot diameterspindle whorl of red cedar (1994) hanging suspendedover a waterfall symbolizing Salish rivers (Fig. 114).'^Several messages — greetings, flight, subsistence —are conveyed by two large eagles constrained withinthe circle enveloping in their wings images of the CoastSalish people who hold salmon within them. At thebase of the escalator, two welcome figures (1996, seetitle page), the male and female ancestors of theMusqueam, stand facing the spindle whorl and cas-cade to greet arriving passengers. On the backs ofeach figure a panel. Flight, depicts eagles of glass, andhumans with upraised arms.

Point's images embody several messages intendedfor the new visitors. Ever gracious, the Musqueam wel-come them to their land. The eagle, a motif found inearlier Salish art straddles the ancient with the modernby alluding to natural and man-made flight. The salmonand water signify not only the traditional economicbasis of the Salish, but the contemporary struggles for

fishing rights. The very position of these images as thefirst monumental carvings that greet newcomers, com-municates clearly and vividly that they have arrived onMusqueam land; with this welcome, the Salish are plac-ing claim on ownership of the land. Point has takenthe motifs of her ancestors and created a work thatnot only stands as an exceptional work of art but alsomakes some very contemporary politically chargedstatements. It is likely that the public, sensitized toaboriginal land claims issues, finally grasp this mes-sage that has been conveyed by various NorthwestCoast art works.

The "Essential" Totem Pole

While the Northwest Coast Indians were carving andraising poles, Europeans, Canadians and Americanswere creating an abstraction - the [essential] totempole. Early on these carvings became signifiers of tradi-tion, embodiments of authentic Nativeness, compel-ling presentations of the mythic world. Tourist litera-ture for well over 100 years has represented the to-tem pole's antiquity and connection to nature; the moreromanticizing passages in the literature project uponthe pole a kind of aura that transforms them from ordi-nary to extra-ordinary.

In their Boasian quest for ethnographic purity, pastscholars have sought a neat encapsulation of clearlydefined types, and rejected or, at least, placed a lesservalue on, hybridized forms. Adhering to a preconceivedmodel of cultural purity discredits most, if not all, cul-tural hybridities, and disregards the dynamic nature ofcultural interactions. In the popular imagination, the"essential" totem pole should be a tall, freestandingcolumn of great antiquity, carved by Indians for Indi-ans. In the quest for this totem pole, and the genuineIndian who makes it, Ellen Neel has been ignored andSalish art degraded. Neel's poles, made strictly ascommodities, were judged not authentic and, for thatmatter, neither was the modern Ellen Neel herself.However, the more recent dismantling of such stereo-types and acceptance of creativity, originality, and

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challenges to the status quo have allowed space forSusan Point's innovative artistic expressions.

Let us address the issue of Neel and Point's gender.Because men are traditional carvers on the NorthwestCoast, any woman carver is not traditional - and thusin the eyes of some, not "authentic." In addition, per-haps, as Nuytten argues, Neel was erased from thediscourse on Kwakwaka'wakw art because she wasfemale working at a time before feminism applaudedendeavors such as hers (Nuytten, personal communi-cation. May 2002). Some thirty years later, Point's gen-der did not negatively influence the public's receptionof her works. However, one must ask whether the ap-preciation of her work has something to do with herbeing Musqueam. Her work emerges from the tradi-tion of a marginalized group whose art has beenunderappreciated. In contrast to the canonical tradi-tions to which many contemporary Northwest CoastNative artists adhere. Point enjoys enormous freedomto experiment. This lack of constraints imposed by acanon, coupled with the absence of Salish male artistsmeasuring up to her brilliance, creates a place for herto be accepted and admired. It would be interestingto speculate on whether, if Point were from a morenorthern Northwest Coast group, she could success-fully compete with recognized male masters of artstyles long admired and valued. I personally hope that,with the enhanced consciousness of the contempo-rary era, any great artist, regardless of tradition or gen-der, would be recognized as such.

I have selected Neel and Point to discuss their rolesnot only as women artists, but also their importance ina revitalized history of Northwest Coast art. Fred Myersintroduces a volume on contemporary perspectivesabout material culture by asserting:

Movement, destablization, and dynamics arehighly visible processes in the social life ofthings. ... changes in the intersections ofdifferent levels of circulation cannot bestudied simply as "breakdowns" - either fromart into commodity of from "culturallyauthentic" to inauthentic - or as simple

appropriations.... The relocation of materialculture demands understanding that value isnever simply defined but is always involvedin global as well as local circuits of ex-change, display and storage. This is espe-cially important as objects move throughspace and time with greater rapidly thanever before, breaking down the analyticalcategories that for so long have been usedto contain and define them theoretically(Myers 2001:1 1-12.).

Both Neel and Point contributed to disassembling still-prevalent stereotypes of "authentic Indians" and genu-ine traditional Indian art, revealing as fictional the veryconcept of ethnic purity. In the Boasian paradigm,authentic Native artists would probably not have com-municated political statements in their work. Neitherwould they be innovative in terms of integrating west-ern and non-western concepts. And they certainlywould not have made authentic art for commercialpurposes. But, in the globalized world of today, Nativeartists like Neel and Point express resistance with art.Neel makes her homeland the center of the universe,whereas Point presents Vancouver as Musqueam terri-tory. Both are innovative, creating new works of "re-actions" between Native and non-Native concepts, withNeel transforming a common item of tourist art into auniquely hybrid image of the Native and non-Nativeworlds, and Point creating a Salish masterpiece from avery untraditional medium, like glass. And both makeexcellent art for non-Native sponsors; Neel for visitorsto Stanley Park and the Totemland organization, Pointfor the Vancouver Airport Commission. What Boasthought about the totem pole models as commodi-ties, about the originality of the Salish, and, indeed,about the timeless traditionalism of Native art itself,has been turned on its head, opening the way for evenmore innovative Northwest Coast totem pole carv-ers—including women.

Acknowledgments.

This paper derives from talks given at the University ofRochester in April, 2002 and Stanford University, May

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2002. The development of the totem pole will be thesubject of a book in progress that I am writing withAaron Class, the working title of which is MonumentalMyths of the Northwest Coast Totem Pole. I thank himfor his impeccable research and compelling ideas onthis subject. I also thank the Susan B. Anthony, Insti-tute of Gender Studies and Janet Catherine Berlo, pastSusan. B. Anthony Professor of Cender Studies at theUniversity of Rochester as well as the Art Departmentat Stanford University where I was Visiting DistinguishedProfessor of American Art for providing the opportu-nity to research, write and give these talks. I want toexpress my appreciation for the generosity of PhilNuytten in sharing his recollections of his friend EllenNeel, Bill McLennan and Dan Savard for their assistancewith the photographs, Laurel Kendall and Igor Krupnikfor their editing of the manuscript and, especially, Su-san Point for her permission to reproduce images ofherself and her works.

Notes

1. See Jonaitis (1988) for an extended reviewof the American Museum of Natural History'sNorthwest Coast art collection, including its sec-tion originating from the Jesup North Pacific Expe-dition Oonaitis 1988:154-213).

2. It is because they stand in public and visu-ally resemble other carvings on the property thatI categorize Point's monumental columnar carv-ings as totem poles.

3. I am indebted to Wayne Suttles who gave atalk "Northwest Coast Art and Essentialism" at theOtsego Institute for Native American Art Studiesin 1999 and introduced this concept of Boas andessentialism, especially from the perspective ofhis life long research on the Salish. See alsoMichael Harkin's concept of Boas' "Kwakiutlism"(Harkin 2001:100-102).

4. During his 1 996 interviews of visitors to thestand of totem poles at Stanley Park, Aaron Classverified these stereotypes.

5. The literature on impact of fairs, collecting andtourism upon Native art is extensive. See in particu-lar Cole (1985), Rydell (1984) and Lee (1 999).

6. The most outstanding recent totem pole

project at Qay'llnagaay, or Sea Lion Town, is thesix new poles erected at Skidegate on Haida Cwaii(Queen Charlotte Islands) as part of a large-scalecultural tourism project. Each pole represents oneof the main historic village sites of the southernHaida - Skidegate, T'aanuu, SCaang CwaiiNinstints, Ts'aahl (ChaatI), K'uuna (Skedans), andCumshewa.

7. See Jonaitis (1995) for reprints of all Boas'essays on art, selections from Primitive Art, andarticles on his art history and his influences ontwentieth century studies of Northwest Coast art.

8. The literature on tourist art is extensive, butthe two most important books on the subjectare Craburn's groundbreaking volume (1976) andPhillips and Steiner's recent edited volume of thecurrent state of scholarship (1 999).

9. As a result of winning an award for this poleat that fair, Neel began to receive orders for smallpoles. By this time, her model poles were notinexpensive, with a 14 inch piece selling for $30,a 36 inch one for $1 50 (Nuytten 1982:57). Whenthe business was good, Neel, helped by her chil-dren, filled an order from the Hudson's Bay Com-pany for 5,000 poles.

10. Kimberly Phillip's unpublished master's the-sis written at the University of British ColumbiaDepartment of Fine Arts (K. Phillips 2000) is an-other excellent source on Ellen Neel.

1 1. The other two artists were Joe Davis andLawrence Paul.

12. In Coast Salish Essays (1987:256, 266),Suttles suggests that the results of the Jesup NorthPacific Expedition had a lot to do with the per-petuation of these stereotypes.

13. I have always thought that if the Salish didnot live just south of the other Northwest Coastpeople who produce such incredible art that theywould be thought of as an important North Ameri-can art-producing people. In their publications, BillHolm (1991) and Steve Brown (1998) have madesignificant contributions to the reassessment ofSalish art.

14. See Suttles 1 987:100-33, for further devel-opment of this idea.

1 5. There has been a wealth of material on Brit-ish Columbia land claims. For a good source,First Nations Land Claims and Treaties in BC bythe Vancouver Public Library (2002), on line at

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www.vpl.vancouver.bc.ca.

1 6. This was done with the assistance of twoother carvers, John Livingston and Jeff Cannell.

ReferencesBarbeau, Marius

1929 Totem Poles of the Gitksan, Upper SkeenaRiver, British Columbia. Anthropological Series 12, Na-tional Museum of Canada Bulletin 6]. Ottawa.

1950 Totem Poles. Anthropological Series 30, Na-tional Museum of Canada Bulletin 119. Ottawa.

Boas, Franz

1 888 The Development of Culture in NorthwestAmerica. Science 12:194-96.

1 900 Art. In The Thompson Indians of British Co-lumbia, byJamesTeit. Pp.376-90. TheJesup NorthPacific Expedition, vol. 1, pt. 4. Memoirs of Ameri-can Museum of Natural History Memoirs, 2. NewYork: G.E. Stechert.

1 95 5 Primitive Art. New York: Dover Press. 1stedition, 1927. Cambridge MA: Harvard UniversityPress.

Brown, Steven

1 998 Native Visions: Evolution in Northwest CoastArt from the Eighteenth through the Twentieth Century.Seattle: Seattle Art IVIuseum and University of Wash-ington Press.

Clifford, James

1997 Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twen-tieth Century. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UniversityPress.

Cole, Douglas

1985 Captured Heritage. The Scramble for NorthwestCoast Artifacts. Seattle: University of WashingtonPress.

Drucker, Philip

1 948 The Antiquity of the Northwest Coast TotemPole. Journal of the Washington Academy of Sciences38(12):389-97.

Duff, Wilson

1 981 Mungo Martin, Carver of the Century. In TheWorld is as Sharp as a Knife. Donald N. Abbott,ed. Pp.3-70. Victoria: British Columbia ProvincialMuseum.

n.d. Thunderbird Park. Victoria: B.C. Government

Travel Bureau.Gerber, Peter, and Vanina Katz-Lahaigue

1 989 Susan A. Point; Joe David; Lawrence Paul:Indianische KUnstlerder WestkiASte Kanadas/Native Art-ists from the Northwest Coast. Zurich: Volker-kundemuseum der Universitat Zurich.

Class, Aaron

2000 Cultural Salvage or Brokerage: The Emergenceof Northwest Coast 'Art' and the Mythologizationof Mungo Martin. Unpublished paper.

Gosden, Chris, and Chantel Knowles

2001 Collecting Colonialism: Material Culture and Co-lonial Change. Oxford: Berg.Graburn, Nelson H.H., ed.

1976 Ethnic and Tourist Art: Cultural Expressions fromthe Fourth World. Berkeley: University of CaliforniaPress.

Gunn, S. W. A.

1965 Totem Poles of Stanley Park. Vancouver:

Whiterocks Publications.Harkin, Michael

2000 (Dis)pleasures of the Text:Boasian Ethnologyon the Central Northwest Coast. In Gateways: Ex-ploring the Legacy of the Jesup North Pacific Expe-dition, 1897-1902. Igor Krupnik and WilliamFitzhugh, eds. Pp. 93-105, Contributions to Cir-cumpolar Anthropology, 1. Washington, DC: ArcticStudies Center.

Hawthorn, Audrey

1993 A Labour of Love: The Making of the Museumof Anthropology, UBC The First Three Decades / 947-1976. Vancouver: University of British ColumbiaPress.

Holm, Bill

1 990 Art. In Northwest Coast. Handbook of NorthAmerican Indians, vol. 7. Wayne Suttles, ed. Pp. 602-32. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution.

Jonaitis, Aldona

1 988 From the Land of the Totem Poles: The North-west Coast Indian Art Collection at the American Mu-seum of Natural History. New York: American Mu-seum of Natural History; Seattle: University of Wash-ington Press.

1 995 A Wealth of Thought: Franz Boas on NativeAmerican Art. Seattle: University of Washington Press.

1 999 Northwest Coast Totem Poles. In UnpackingCulture: Art and Commodity in Colonial and PostcolonialWorlds. Ruth Phillips and Christopher Steiner, eds. Pp.104-20. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Kew, Michael

1 990 History of Coastal British Columbia Since 1849.In Handbook of North American Indians, vol.7. North-west Coast. Wayne Suttles, ed. Pp. 1 59-68. Wash-ington, DC: Smithsonian Institution.

Lee, Molly

1 999 Tourism and Taste Cultures: Collecting NativeArt in Alaska at the Turn of the Twentieth Century. InUnpacking Culture: Art and Commodity in Colonial andPostcolonial Worlds. Ruth Phillips and ChristopherSteiner, eds. Pp. 267-80. Berkeley: University of Cali-fornia Press.

Macnair, Peter

2000 Susan Point: Her Place by the River. In SusanPoint: Coast Salish Artist. G. Wyatt, ed. Pp. 25-44.Vancouver: Douglas & Mclntyre.

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Macnair, Peter, Alan Hoover, and Kevin Nearly

1980 The Legacy: Continuing Traditions of CanadianNorthwest Coast Indian Art. Victoria: Royal British Co-lumbia Museum.

Malin, Edward

1 986 Totem Poles of the Pacific Northwest Coast.

Portland: Timber Press.McLennan, Bill

2000 Contemporary Architectural Carvings. In Su-san Point: Coast Salish Artist. C. Wyatt, ed. Pp. 94-7. Vancouver: Douglas & Mclntyre.

Myers, Fred, ed.

2001 The Empire of Things: Regimes of Value andMaterial Culture. Santa Fe: School for AmericanResearch.

Nuytten, Phil

1982 The Totem Carvers: Charlie James, Ellen Neel,

Mungo Martin. Vancouver: Panorama Publications.Phillips, Kimberly

2000 Ellen Neel. Unpublished paper (quoted with

author's permission).Phillips, Ruth, and Christopher Steiner, eds.

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lonial and Postcolonial Worlds. Berkeley: Universityof California Press.Point, Susan

1996 Artist's statement in Topographies: Aspectsof Recent B.C. Art. G. Arnold, M. Gagnon, D.Jensen,eds. Pp. 132-33. Vancouver: Vancouver Art Gal-lery.

Rydell, Robert

1984 All the World's a Fair: Visions of Empire at Ameri-can International Expositions, 1876-1916. Chicago:University of Chicago Press.

Suttles, Wayne

/ 987 Coast Salish Essays. Compiled and edited withthe assistance of Ralph Maud. Seattle: University ofWashington Press.

Teit, James

1900 The Thompson Indians of British Columbia; TheJesup North Pacific Expedition, vol. 1, pt. 4. Memoirsof American Museum of Natural History Memoirs, 2.New York: C.E. Stechert.

Wyatt, Gary, ed.

2000 Susan Point: Coast Salish Artist. Vancouver:Douglas & Mclntyre.

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(Consumers, l^hen and !\Jow

GLORIA CRANMER WEBSTER

In the early 1970s, I worked as an assistant curator atthe Museum of Anthropology at the University of Brit-ish Columbia in Vancouver BC. One day, when I wasvery busy, the late Wilson Duff came in and showedme a raven rattle, saying, "Isn't it beautiful?" I agreedthat it was. Then he asked, "But how do you read it?" Ireplied impatiently, "Wilson, I don't read those things, Ishake them." The title of this chapter could have been"Shakers and Readers," because that is how the worldis divided for me. There are us and there are those whowrite about or "read" us. Readers have very little rel-evance in the world of Shakers, primarily because theirstatements are so often wrong.

Franz Boas' arrival on the Northwest Coast of Brit-ish Columbia marked the beginning of a long relation-ship with our people, the Kwakwaka'wakw, more com-monly known to the outside world as the "KwakiutI," aterm that is as inaccurate as calling the indigenouspeople of this continent "Indians". Kwakwaka'wakwis not a new word, as some Readers have suggested;it has always meant all of the people who speak thelanguage, Kwakwala. I am a present-day Kwakwalaspeaker and the word is certainly known to me andother speakers with my level of fluency.

Boas collaborated with George Hunt in gatheringmaterial relating to nearly all aspects ofKwakwaka'wakw culture at a time when that culturewas losing its center. His dependence on Hunt's knowl-edge of the Kwakwala language is repeatedly acknowl-edged throughout their long collaboration. George

Hunt was my great-grandfather. His oldest son, David,was my mother's father. We have always known thatGeorge was the half-breed son of an English father anda high-ranking £anget [Tlingit—ed.] woman fromTangas, Alaska. Counter to some modern Readers ofour history who see this pedigree as an indication thatGeorge Hunt was not a legitimate participant inKwakwaka'wakw culture, we take pride in our Alas-kan connection. These ties give us the right, as Hunt'sdescendants, to treasures brought to Fort Rupert byAnisglaga, as my great-great-grandmother was knownto us. Hunt's marriage to Tlali^i'lakw (Lucy) was aKwagu'^ ceremony, with her family bringing kis'u, in-cluding names, dances, and songs, to him, thus estab-lishing his position in the society. Hunt's position be-came stronger each time one of his sons married intofamilies rich in kis'u. Each of his daughters gave herhusband's family kis'u coming from Lucy's family aswell as from Anisalaga's family.

On March 20, 1905, Hunt wrote to Boas sayingthat, "The Indian Agent is trying to get my three boysto leave the Indians and turn to be white men, but theIndians don't want for my boys to leave them." The"boys" were my grandfather and his brothers Samueland Jonathan, all of whom had married chiefs daugh-ters from different tribes of the Kwakwaka'wakw.That the "Indians" did not want them to leave seems aclear indication of acceptance, in my view. Further-more, when George Hunt was dying, he called to-gether the Kwag'u^ chiefs and asked that one of them

36 1

marry fat^g^a'widzamga (Francine), his second wife,so that she would remain in Fort Rupert rather thanreturn to her home village. George feared that she wouldnot be well taken care of by her own people. Soonafter Hunt's death, Charlie Wilson, a chief of the Kwagu'^,married Francine. It seems highly unlikely that such ahigh-ranking person would honor the dying wish ofone who was not accepted.

Boas entered our world when people were experi-encing drastic changes in their lives, including rapidpopulation decline due to introduced diseases, andloss of land and access to traditional resource sites.Missionaries and government agents added to the up-heaval by attempting to "civilize" us in their residentialschools, and, in time, succeeded in pressuring the Ca-nadian government to enact legislation prohibiting thepotlatch. In 1921, the federal government took manyof our treasures from us, following a large potlatchthat had been held in violation of the law prohibitingsuch ceremonies. In 1980, we opened our cultural cen-ter, in which is housed part of this Potlatch Collection,returned to us by the Canadian Museum of Civilization.We asked our old people what an appropriate namewould be for our center. It was at their suggestion thatwe decided to call it the U'mista Cultural Centre. Theysaw the repatriation of our treasures as a kind ofu'mista, that is, the return of people who, in earliertimes, were taken captive by other tribes and returnedto their homes, either through payment of ransom orby a retaliatory raid. Fluent Kwakwala speakers arefamiliar with the expression u'mis'wist'as that is usedwhen one is angry with or frustrated by another per-son. It means, "may you go back to where you comefrom."

Other Readers have made the U'mista Cultural Cen-ter the subject of their reading in ways that have noth-ing to do with what we did. We did not even thinkabout Readers when we designed the exhibit. Verysimply, the exhibit turned out the way it did for tworeasons: firstly, the only designer I wanted to workwith was not available; secondly, I did not feel that I

could tell the story of potlatch prohibition betterthan those people who actually experienced thoseterrible times. So, the exhibit texts are copies ofletters, petitions, and reports, both for and againstthe potlatch. We did not need individual labels forthe masks because we know what they are. Then,came the Readers who read all kinds of things thatwere not there. We certainly were not trying to con-fuse white visitors, or forcing any questions on them.As for the Readers' claims that we left off the labelsfor poetic impact, our Board of Directors, mostlyfishermen, would have laughed.

In terms of Kwakwaka'wakw society, Boas andthose who followed him were the consumers of ourculture. They took away knowledge and treasures todistant places that had no connection to our world.Today, we have become consumers of a different kind.We are reclaiming what was lost during the "dark years,"as our old people say. In recent years, on the North-west coast, there has been a renewed interest in build-ing canoes, an activity that had almost died out as ourpeople adapted to motorized vessels. The detaileddescription of canoe construction recorded by Huntand Boas has been invaluable to novice canoe build-ers. The missionaries almost succeeded in their effortsto wipe out our language, so that we utilize the Boas/Hunt texts in developing language material to teachKwakwala to both adults and children.

Another example of the value of the Boas/Huntmaterial has to do with the construction of kerfed boxes.When one of our carvers bent his first box, he sewed ittogether with a twisted cedar withe. The next day, helooked at his work and found that the withe had un-raveled. It was only when he referred to the Boas/Huntvolume on technology that he discovered the correctway to twist the withe.

Although Boas and Hunt did not work extensivelywith the HPdzakw of Bella Bella, their work is valuedthere as well. A HPdzakw friend said, "Boas certainlypaved the way for doing business with our people in amore inclusive way when one considers the way the

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anthros [anthropologists—ed.] of today are doing busi-ness." (P. Waterfall, personal communication, 1996). Heruse of the material relates primarily to names, and shetold me that her grandfather had given her son hisname. Both her grandparents had very sketchy infor-mation about the history of the name. She then turnedto the Boas/Hunt material and read it to the oldpeople, who became very excited, because hear-ing it triggered additional information. She was thenable to combine their version with the informationfrom Boas and ended up with a complete history, whichher son memorized. He wrote it out in a book form,completed with his own illustrations. She also uses theBoas/Hunt material to cross-reference names, whichare still remembered while their histories are almostforgotten. These few examples of the way we "con-sume" the material produced by Boas and Hunt givesome idea of the distance between us, the Shakers,and them, the Readers.

Following George Hunt's death in 1933, my fatherDan Cranmer worked with Boas and his daughter, HeleneYampolsky, on the KwakiutI Grammar, published in1947. Franz Boas died in 1942, and I quote from aletter of condolence my father wrote to Mrs. Yampolsky,dated January 9, 1943: "The sorrowful tidings of yourdeep affliction reached me today and, oh my dearHelene, if only sympathy were like waves of light, howthe rays would pour from my heart to illumine thegloomy veil of grief which wraps you in its somberfolds." In the letter, my father refers to Boas as "mymaster," for whom he would sing mourning songs atan upcoming potlatch. He also mentioned that theKwagu'^ of Fort Rupert had sung mourning songsfor Boas. I wonder how many people whom otheranthropologists have studied have the same feel-ings of respect and affections that our people hadand still have for Franz Boas?

In 1 986, the descendents of Franz Boas and GeorgeHunt gathered in Alert Bay and Fort Rupert to cel-ebrate the centenary of the first meeting of these tworemarkable men. Although the Hunts outnumbered the

Boas family by several hundred, we had a great timegetting to know each other. The Boas family pre-sented us with copies of one thousand pages ofthe correspondence between Franz Boas andGeorge Hunt, which has been of great value to us.Other anthropologists followed Boas into our terri-tory, but I cannot imagine such a gathering happen-ing with their families.

1990 marked the 10th anniversary of the openingof the U'mista Cultural Centre. At that time, my young-est brother gave a potlatch during which Dr. NormanBoas received his grandfather's name, originally givento Franz Boas in 1 896. The name means, "speakingwell from the beginning." Norman's wife, Doris, receivedthe name Xwani, meaning, "swaying from side to side."The name had been given to (a young Russian anthro-pologist) Julia Averkieva when she accompanied Boason his last trip of 1930-31. The decision to give thesenames was made by three of George Hunt's grand-daughters, Agnes Cranmer nee Hunt, Helen Know, andher sister Margaret Frank, both of whom were daugh-ters of Emily, George's oldest daughter.

George Hunt traveled to New York in 1903, towork with Franz Boas on the collections they hadaccumulated for the American Museum of NaturalHistory. He kept a Journal of his trip, beginning withhis departure from Fort Rupert on January 24th. Henamed each place at which the train stopped, of-ten adding the number of miles he had traveled, thepopulation at each stop, and the elevation. Underone of the entries headed, "1807 miles from FortRupert," he wrote:

...and came to Keewatin and 1852 and wepassed Normen and now feel like if I was inthe world unknown for I did feel like I wasdaid man from all my relations or somethinglike wounded duck with one wing broken.No friend near to me. O I thought how foolishI was to leave my near relations to go andpleas other man and that I only got a veryshort time to live in this world oh I felt sorry.But I at last made up my mind to go throughwith my trip.

GLORIA WEBSTER

363

Unfortunately, the entries stop before his arrival inNew York, but there are no further regrets expressedabout making the journey.

The exhibit «Chiefly Feasts», which opened at theAmerican Museum of Natural History in 1991, was an-other chapter in the Boas/Hunt story. A year earlier,the curator of the exhibit, Aldona Jonaitis, invited agroup of our old people to come to New York to lookat the treasures that had been selected for the exhibit.Three of Hunt's grandchildren and two great-grand-children were part of the group. So, 87 years after Hunt'slonely visit to this museum, some of his descendentscame to do much the same work as he had done withBoas. This was the first time most of our group hasseen the masks since they had been bought for themuseum by Boas and Hunt. It was also the first timethat George Hunt's detailed information on the collec-tion was connected to individual masks, revealing thatmany of them belonged to the same story. Trans-lating my great-grandfather's notes was one of thehighlights of my involvement with the exhibit. Manyof Hunt's descendants attended the official exhibitopening, and the Boas family was there as well. NormanBoas spoke on behalf of his family and my brotherspoke on behalf of ours. Chiefly Feasts was our ex-hibit; I had worked on other exhibits in large museums,

but Chiefly Feasts stands out as the one project towhich I really felt that our people had made a signifi-cant contribution. My feeling has a lot to do with thelegacy of Franz Boas and George Hunt. The exhibitwas the beginning of a new relationship between Shak-ers and a few Readers that I hope will become wide-spread in the larger museum community. It broughttogether two different kinds of consumers, each ofwhom benefited from the experience in a very posi-tive way.

In the last hundred years, the world of theKwakwaka'wakw has changed irrevocably. Today, incommon with most Native communities, we strugglewith many social economic and other problems. Wesee the fishing industry that was the main source ofincome on our reserves becoming more uncertain eachseason, our environment being destroyed by industryand development, while the issue of land claims re-mains unsettled. At the same time, we strengthenwhat was left of our culture after the white peopledid their best to destroy it. In that task we are morefortunate than most indigenous groups, because wehave a strong foundation to build on and for thatwe owe much to Hi^dzakwal's (Franz Boas) andKixitasu' (George Hunt). Cilakas'la, ninigad 'wi'ump—thank you, wise forefathers.

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CURATORS, COLLECTORS, AND CONSUMERS

OTHER TITLES IN THE SERIES

Contributions to C

ircumpoiar /^nthropologt)

Vol.1: Gateways: Exploring the Legacy of the Jesup North Pacific Expedition, ] 897-1902. Edited byIgor Krupnik and William W. Fitzhugh. Arctic Studies Center, National Museum of Natural History,Smithsonian Institution. Washington, DC. 2001. xvi+335 pp.

Vol. 2: Honoring Our Elders. A History of Eastern Arctic Anthropology. Edited by William W. Fitzhugh, Stephen Loring,and Daniel Odess. Arctic Studies Center, National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution. Washington,DC. 2002. xvi+319 pp.

Vol. 3: Akuzilleput Igaqullghet. Our Words Put to Paper. Sourcebook in St. Lawrence Island Yupik Heritage and History.Edited by Igor Krupnik, Willis Walunga, and Vera Metcalf. Compiled by Igor Krupnik and Lars Krutak. Arctic StudiesCenter, National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution. Washington, DC. 2002. 464 pp.

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