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Articles
Web posted Tuesday, June 11, 2002
Traditional rattle seized, returned to Southeast
Raven rattle was confiscated in undercover operation by the National Park
Service
By BEN MURRAY
SITKA SENTINEL
SITKA - After 200 years and an extraordinary journey, a piece of Alaska Native heritage came home last weekend.
A traditional Raven rattle, or Yeil Sheishoox, dating back to the early 1800s, returned to Southeast several years after being seized in an undercover operation by the National Park Service.
The ceremonial rattle was repatriated under the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act of 1990 and was unveiled Saturday in Juneau as part of Celebration 2002, a biennial gathering of Tlingit, Haida and Tsimshian tribes.
An original Raven rattle in Southeast is rare because most existing rattles are housed in museums outside the state, said Steve Henrikson, curator of collections at the Alaska State Museum.
"There aren't that many in Alaska," he said. "It's a pretty special thing."
The rattle has been part of a story straight out of a detective novel, involving special agents, shady deals and large sums of money.
The rattle was believed to have been crafted in Wrangell in the early 1800s, said former Sitka resident Harold Jacobs, the cultural resource specialist for the Central Council of Tlingit and Haida Indian Tribes of Alaska in Juneau.
Its journey began when it was transported as part of the Walter Waters collection to the Denver Art Museum.
Sometime before 1954, the rattle was handed over to the Fine Art Center's Taylor Museum in Colorado Springs, Colo., in compensation for a piece the Denver museum had borrowed and misplaced, said Cathy Wright, a Taylor curator.
In 1993 the rattle moved again, said Erny Kuncl, retired National Park Service ranger and a park service special agent in Denver at the time.
Kuncl became involved in the case in the mid-1990s when he was contacted by a friend who had seen a magazine advertisement for a Raven rattle on sale by a dealer in Aspen, Colo.
Kuncl said he received tips that the Taylor Museum had not followed proper procedures relating to the sale of Native artifacts under the repatriation act.
Under the law, all U.S. museums receiving federal funds were required to submit inventories of Native American artifacts to the tribes from which they originated by November 1993.
Just before inventories were due, the Taylor Museum sold its collection of Alaska Native artifacts, Jacobs said.
"A number of other items from the same museum got away from us before we could stop them," he said.
Wright, a curator at the Taylor Museum in 1993, disputed the idea that the museum ducked the deadline.
"That was not the intention of the museum," she said. The museum was simply clearing out its exhibition of Northwest artifacts at the time, she said.
The collection was sold to a Colorado Springs buyer for $900,000, plus a $200,000 donation to the museum. The collection was then donated to the Fenimore Art Museum in Cooperstown, N.Y.
The New York curator sold the rattle for $27,000 to the Aspen dealer, Kuncl said. The dealer, looking to sell the rattle for $87,000, placed the magazine ad that put Kuncl on the case.
While obtaining a search warrant for the dealer's gallery, Kuncl found out that the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency and the IRS were investigating the dealer on separate charges.
"I started befriending him in an undercover operation and eventually bought it for $37,000," Kuncl said.
Kuncl then executed his search warrant on the gallery. He found nearly a pound of marijuana on the premises, and the dealer was arrested.
No criminal charges were ever brought against him for possession of the rattle. No one at the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center has ever been charged with violations concerning the sale of its collections in 1993.
"It was never quite strong enough to bring criminal charges," said Joe Mackey, an assistant U.S. attorney in Denver who worked on the case.
The rattle will be held in the Alaska State Museum in Juneau until construction is finished on a new museum in Wrangell.
Although the approximate age and geographic origin of the Wrangell rattle have been determined, little else is known about the piece.
That is not uncommon because the history of Raven rattles in general has been lost over time, Henrikson of the state museum said. Though many Raven rattles are similar in design, the meaning of the carvings is not fully understood, he said.
The Wrangell rattle has a common design, with the main body depicting a raven with a face on its underside that is often interpreted as a hawk. On the raven's back is a delicate human-like figure lying on its back, sharing a tongue with the head of another bird, often seen as a crane or heron, sprouting from the raven's tail.
Although Raven rattles are known to be used in Native ceremonies, it is not certain who used them or for exactly what purpose, Henrikson said.
"They may have started out as something that was originally used by shaman," he said.
Rapid changes in temperature and humidity can damage the wood, so the rattle will need time to acclimatize to the damp air of Juneau after traveling from Colorado. State museum chief curator Bruce Kato said the rattle may be ready for display in about one and a half weeks.