There\u2019s a great deal of doubt involved in matching historic Native jewelers with their creations, even in cases that seem straightforward like that of a silver snuffbox owned by Rudolph Walton and emblazoned with his initials.<\/p>\n
\u201cI kind of wonder \u2018Did he make it or was it a gift?\u2019\u201d Zachary Jones asked during his lecture on documenting Tlingit, Haida and Tshimshian jewelers at Celebration last week.<\/p>\n
\u201cHe made it,\u201d called out a woman from the audience, adding that she had heard so from his granddaughter.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe should chat,\u201d Jones responded.<\/p>\n
Jones, a former Sealaska Heritage Institute curator, current state archivist and University of Alaska Southeast lecturer, is working on uncovering the lives of jewelers past and present.<\/p>\n
Jones has searched through museums and historic documents but said it\u2019s the living who provide some of his best leads. He had a booth at Centennial Hall during Celebration 2016 where he sought more spontaneous leads, like the one that occurred during his talk, and invited future listeners to contact him. (You can watch the lecture online at https:\/\/vimeo.com\/170116820)<\/p>\n
Jones first became interested in the provenance of Native jewelry during his time at SHI, the nonprofit arm of Sealaska Corp.<\/p>\n
\u201cFolks would walk in,\u201d he said, \u201chold their wrists out and be like \u2018Can you tell me who made this bracelet?\u2019 \u2026 and I often had to say \u2018I\u2019m not certain.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n
There\u2019s no guidebook to Tlingit jewelers and many historic silversmiths didn\u2019t sign their work. In his quest to document them, Jones said he\u2019s tried to study every historic piece he can lay his eyes on, in a museum or out of one.<\/p>\n
But most museums have only a few items attributed to artists. It wasn\u2019t something of importance to early collectors, Jones said, but he thinks \u201c… it\u2019s important to acknowledge folks, so what I\u2019m doing here and at my booth at Celebration and elsewhere is talking to folks and hoping to have folks come forward with those stories.\u201d<\/p>\n
Jones seeks other clues to identifying artists\u2019 works. One is style, like a piece in the Sheldon Jackson Museum that Jones has attributed to Jim Jacobs (1846-1941, Tlingit names Y\u00e9ilnaaw\u00fa and K\u00edchxhaak) by \u201cthis classic double line I\u2019ve never seen any other artist do and some of the other signature features that are his,\u201d such as three hash marks on the cheek and under the jaw or beak.<\/p>\n
Another hint is handwriting. Several of the silversmiths Jones discussed would write \u201cSitka\u201d on the spoons they sold to tourists. Walton (1867-1951, Kaaw\u00f3otk\u2019) \u201cwrote \u2018Sitka\u2019 unlike anyone else,\u201d Jones said, pointing out the artist\u2019s cursive. Another silversmith has become known for his \u201cwacky \u2018k\u2019\u201d and Jones has been trying to match Sitka Charlie (X\u2019aasook\u00e1) with an all-caps, serif \u201cSITKA\u201d with a characteristic slanted \u201cS.\u201d<\/p>\n
But it\u2019s the silversmiths themselves that Jones really wants to talk about. \u201cThere\u2019s been a lot of books … where people have talked about style and what it looks like but not who the jewelers themselves were,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
About Jacobs, he says: \u201cHe loved his children. Unfortunately some of them died young, and people recall really his sadness and grief over losing his children because he had such a kind heart.\u201d<\/p>\n
Jones recalled Walton\u2019s work with the Alaska Native Brotherhood, saying he \u201creally fought for land rights and a lot of things that were important to the community at the time. Folks today benefit from his work and service.\u201d<\/p>\n
Charles Gunnok (1846-1923, G\u00f3onwakh) was not only a silversmith but a Native policeman and Kake\u2019s first mayor. Sitka Jack (1836-1916, Khaltseixh) married an Eagle Nest house woman named Martha and had 13 daughters with her. \u201cSo people sometimes say that\u2019s why there\u2019s so many Eagle Nest house people,\u201d Jones joked.<\/p>\n
Also in the audience was Kathryn Bunn-Marcuse, an art historian who has done work on Haida jewelers and is the associate director of the Bill Holm Center for the Study of Northwest Native Art at the Burke Museum of the University of Washington.<\/p>\n
She thanked Jones for his research.<\/p>\n
\u201cYou have really done so much work to bring out the people and what is their family history and who were they, what was their role in the clan, and that is even harder\u201d than just identifying by style, she said. \u201cIt\u2019s such an important part of the picture.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
There\u2019s a great deal of doubt involved in matching historic Native jewelers with their creations, even in cases that seem straightforward like that of a silver snuffbox owned by Rudolph Walton and emblazoned with his initials. \u201cI kind of wonder \u2018Did he make it or was it a gift?\u2019\u201d Zachary Jones asked during his lecture […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":107,"featured_media":27666,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_stopmodifiedupdate":false,"_modified_date":"","wds_primary_category":7,"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[74],"yst_prominent_words":[],"class_list":["post-27665","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-life","tag-arts-and-culture"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27665","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/107"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=27665"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27665\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/27666"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=27665"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=27665"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=27665"},{"taxonomy":"yst_prominent_words","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/yst_prominent_words?post=27665"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}