History Detectives of the North West

The Daily has a front page story on a Washington State professor and museum curator who is on the search for some lost Haida works.

MUSEUM SLEUTH HUNTS FOR LOST HAIDA VILLAGE
By James Vassallo
The Daily News
Friday July 14, 2006
Pages One and Three

A Washington State museum curator has turned international sleuth in the hunt for the last depiction of a traditional Haida village.

Robin Wright, University of Washington art history professor and Burke Museum curator, is trying to track down 14 hand carved Haida house models from a set of 29 that have been lost for more than 50 years.

“We’re trying to get out the word for people to look in their attics or basements, it will probably be collectors or dealers that would have the knowledge of these, “said Wright. “All we know is there are 14 of them out there somewhere.”

The houses, commissioned from Haida carvers for the 1893 World’s Fair in Chicago. are around three feet square with accompanying totem poles that are three-to-five feet tall. The models are an accurate representation of the traditional village of Skidegate before the last house came down in 1905.

“When the World’s Fair ended much of the anthropology building – became incorporated in what is now the Field Museum, it was the core of their founding collection,” she said.

“They displayed them until around 1900 or so when they decide to get rid of some of them. It was ‘seen one, seen em all’, and they’ve got 29 so they figured they could exchange them with other museums and get collections they didn’t have.

“I suppose they were considered dioramas or exhibit props rather than works of art at that time. They probably weren’t valued the way we would value them today.”

Chicago’s Field Museum, which still has 10 of the houses and 15 freestanding poles, conducted two significant exchanges – one with the Brooklyn Museum in New York and one with the University Museum in Philadelphia. One of the poles was also sent to Vienna, Austria where it remains in the ethnographic museum there.

“One was also give to the Marshall Field (department store), which gives its name to the Field Museum and they used it as window dressing for many years,” said Wright. “The last I was able to track, they’d auctioned off a bunch of their old window dressings in about 1960 and it disappeared from there.”

In the case of the Haida Houses sent to the Brooklyn museum and the University Museum in Philadelphia, the institutions have lost track of that part of their collection.

“The University museum loaned theirs to the children’s museum which is part of the Philadelphia Art Museum and there’s no record of them coming back,” she said.

“The Brooklyn museum has one complete model house and parts of two others.”

One of the houses from the Philadelphia children’s museum has been located in the Portland Art Museum in Oregon. It was purchased from an art dealer in the 1950’s.

“That gives me hope that maybe they’ve got into the market and are in private collections somewhere,” said Wright., who is working with a team of three Haida curators on the search.

“I suspect that because they were so large … if we find them, that the houses may have been discarded but that the pole, which was the one piece with the elaborate carving on it, would have been kept.”

However, that doesn’t mean Wright or the Haida themselves have given up on the houses. For those they can’t find, they hope to commission a new generation of Haida carvers to replace them.

“We have photographs of the models as they were presented in the Chicago World’s Fair,” said Nathalie Macfarlane, Haida Gwaii Museum director.

“We’re going to do our best over the next year to find the pieces that are missing, but if we can’t we’ll commission artists to create new replicas for an exhibition in 2010.”

The plan would also see the houses and poles that have been located at other museums borrowed and displayed in the new Haida Heritage Centre in Qay’Ilnagaay, which is scheduled to open next year.

The exhibition would be a more genuine representation of the Haida than the World’s Fair display.

The original model included tags written by James Deans, an adventurer and once indentured servant of the Hudson’s Bay Company who was charged by Franz Boas, the father of anthropology, to procure the models.

However, the Haida themselves were not brought to the fair, although First Nations from Fort Rupert and Alert Bay were.

”We’d be bringing back this model village, but interpreting it in a much richer way than it was in Chicago,” said Wright. “Of course with the cultural situation in Chicago in 1893 the emphasis was all on the industrial nation, how great the United States was and to do that, to allow industrial nation’s to blow their horn, they would display cultures from around the world that were “less developed” or “primitive.”

In order to offer a more accurate story, the research team will be taking advantage of the Haida Gwaii Museum’s perpetual genealogical research project which collects information not only on the ancestral aspect of family lineage but also the newest generation of Haida.

“The (model) houses themselves are connected to certain clans and certain houses in Skidegate, so it’s really a wonderful project because the museum’s been involved in doing genealogical research and actually identify where each of the clans lived, represented by this model,” said MacFarlane. “We can ultimately link the historical material to present day families in Skidegate, that’s the great part of it, that’s the community in the research.

The search for the Haida Houses is a collaborative project with the Haida Gwaii Museum in Skidegate, B. C., and the Field Museum in Chicago, to develop a traveling exhibit of the house models and document them in a book.

The research is partially funded by the UW Royalty Research Fund, a Canadian Embassy Senior Fellowship, and a National Endowment for the Humanities Exhibit Planning Grant.

Anyone who believes they know the location of a missing house or pole should email wright@u.washington.edu .