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March 7, 2002

RESEARCHER TO DO FIRST-EVER STUDY ON HORN SPOON COLLECTION

A visiting scholar with the Sealaska Heritage Institute is conducting the first known study on a collection of horn spoons carved by Southeast Alaska Natives more than a century ago.

The 40 elaborately carved feast spoons are made of sheep and goat horn and date from circa 1860 to 1900, said Dr. Anne-Marie Victor-Howe, an anthropologist with the Peabody Museum of Archeology and Ethnology at Harvard University who is studying the collection.

The spoons were in storage for decades at the museum in Cambridge, Massachusetts but little was known about them, said Victor-Howe, in Juneau this month on a fellowship.

"I was really interested in this collection because nobody had done any research on it," said Victor-Howe, noting anthropologists and art historians generally have focused on cultural items such as painted house fronts, totem poles, masks and headdresses.

"Few scholars have studied more apparently utilitarian objects such as this collection of spoons," said Victor-Howe, who likens the spoons to miniature totem poles.

Victor-Howe is interviewing traditional scholars plus Tlingit and Haida artists in Southeast villages to learn the meaning of the carvings, which depict figures such as a sea creature on one spoon and three frogs, an owl and a man on another.

The tribes used the spoons during major ceremonial feasts, or Koo.eex’, held after the death of a Tlingit or Haida individual, she said.

"They were used to transfer ceremonial food from serving bowls and plates to smaller dishes and as eating implements by feast participants," she said. "They are the most elaborately decorated items used at such feasts and are of great ritualistic significance."

Victor-Howe has found that shamans, or medicine men, owned some of the spoons. The shaman spoons show depictions of supernatural beings representing spirits the shaman acquired on spirit quests.

"Spirits reside in shamanic objects, and even today they are considered to be articles of great power," said Dr. Rosita Worl, president of Sealaska Heritage Institute, which is collaborating with Victor-Howe on the project.

Worl, an anthropologist and a Tlingit, will write the preface of a planned book, which will include photos and interpretations of the collection.

News Article:
"Native spoons draw anthropologist to Southeast "