By Tom Morphet

A Chilkat Brown Bear tunic is scheduled to arrive in Klukwan Friday, brought by clan leader and former village council president Joe Hotch.

When it arrives here, the woven, full-length garment will be only the ninth tunic in Tlingit possession, said Harold Jacobs, cultural resource specialist for Tlingit-Haida Central Council in Juneau.

"It’s a beautiful tunic," said Jacobs. Ceremonial tunics are considerably rarer than Chilkat blankets, as not as many were made, he said.

Sealaska Heritage Institute repatriated the tunic from the Phoebe A. Hearst Museum of Anthropology in Berkeley, Calif., on behalf of Klukwan’s Kaagwaantaan clan after Hotch recognized it in a photograph he was shown at a meeting in Juneau.

Hotch was serving on the institute’s Council of Traditional Scholars when he saw the tunic in a recent photo of Hearst artifacts from Southeast. The tunic matched one in a 1923 photo taken in Klukwan he was given by Haines historian Lib Hakkinen, Hotch said.

"She gave it to me when we were arguing the Whale House case. She said, ‘You might need this one day.’" Hakkinen died Sunday in Oregon. To honor Hakkinen’s help, the tunic will be temporarily stored at the Sheldon Museum in Haines.

Hotch is the hit saati, or caretaker, of the Brown Bear House, a part of the village’s Kaagwaantan clan. "An item like that is important to all clan houses, but it’s important to the Brown Bear House because our ancestors put that together to say, ‘This is what people will know you by. This is who you are.’ It will be important to my nephews and nieces, and it will go on down from there," he said.

On Friday, Hotch will take the tunic to all the village clan houses to share its homecoming with ancestors, according to a Sealaska press release. It also will be shown at the church, school, clinic and village office. "I want our tunic to come back and visit every house that had respect for it," Hotch said.

The 1923 photograph is apparently from a family trip to Klukwan, showing Kaagwaantaan clan leader Kudeinahaa (Mike Kadanah) wearing the tunic, flanked by 9-year-old Lib and her mother, Elisabeth Sheldon, two visitors from Haines, and Kudeinahaa’s wife, Maggie.

The tunic was in Tlingit hands at least until 1939, when it was photographed in Skagway, where Maggie moved after Kudeinahaa’s death. Dr. Rosita Worl, president of the heritage institute, said the tunic was privately donated to the California museum and photographed by Sealaska ethnologist Kathy Miller in 2004. Sprayed years ago with DDT and arsenic as a preservative, the tunic was to be cleaned of contaminants in Seattle earlier this week.

Worl said about 50 Tlingit pieces have been returned to Southeast since passage in 1990 of a federal law requiring museums receiving federal funds to return funerary, religious and ceremonial objects. "We want those things we used in ceremonies, most of all. We have a priority for those. We want those back."

Pieces returned to date include headdresses, Chilkat blankets, rattles, daggers, crest hats, and shaman objects, but there are thousands of pieces remaining in public and private museums, said Tlingit-Haida’s Jacobs. "There are rows after rows after rows. The National Museum of the American Indian and the National Museum of Natural History have more than 50 Chilkat blankets each. That’s more than we have in Tlingit hands."

About a half dozen pieces have been repatriated to the Chilkat Valley, including a crest hat, a headdress and a Chilkat blanket.