PROPATRIATION: Possibilities for Art after NAGPRA

Abstract

The repatriation of dozens of items of Tlingit clan property in 2001 restored at.óow that had been stolen from the Saanya Kwáan village of Cape Fox in 1899; it also launched a new relationship between Tlingit peoples and the museums that had returned their cultural patrimony. Following the repatriations, Cape Fox Corporation, the village corporation for the Saanya Kwáan, donated cedar logs to four museums that had returned totem poles or house posts to Alaska. In return, these four museums—the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology at Harvard University, National Museum of the American Indian, Burke Museum of Natural History and Culture, and Field Museum—commissioned Tlingit master carver Nathan Jackson, and later his son Stephen Jackson, to carve the cedar logs into new totem poles that would replace the repatriated poles. This paper proposes “propatriation” as a name for this growing practice of museum commissions to replace repatriated objects in the NAGPRA era. It also analyzes the impact of Nathan and Stephen Jackson's totem poles on the galleries of these U.S. museums, arguing that propatriation helps to “indigenize” the museum and to present Tlingit art according to Tlingit values.