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Sealaska Heritage Institute in 2003 partnered with the Burke Museum to create two new house posts for the Seattle facility. The posts will replace two house posts from the Tlingit village of Gaash that were returned by the museum to Cape Fox Corporation in July 2001. Through the project, the museum hired Stephen and Nathan Jackson to carve the new posts for its permanent collection. (Photos) 

The new posts are original designs, not meant to be replicas, but contemporary expressions based on the Teikweidi Tlingit story of Kaats, the grizzly bear hunter, who married a grizzly bear and was eventually killed by his bear children.  Nathan Jackson’s design closely follows the form of the old cedar house posts, showing the grizzly bear wife with Kaats in her arms.  Stephen Jackson’s design shows a moment at the end of the story, after Kaats has been killed by his bear children and torn limb from limb.  This innovative approach to the subject, will also employ new media, casting the highly complex design in urethane foam resin.

In 1899, railroad magnate E. H. Harriman took a crew of scientists, artists, and friends on a survey of the Alaskan coast.  On their return trip, the expedition took a number of clan treasures from the Tlingit village of Gaash at Cape Fox without the knowledge or permission of their owners.  When they returned to Seattle, Harriman gave one of two grizzly bear house posts to the Burke Museum.  The other post went to the University of Michigan, only later to be acquired by the Burke in an exchange.  In July 2001, in company with four other North American museums, the Burke returned clan treasures to the Cape Fox Corporation. This was accomplished with the help of the Harriman Expedition Retraced voyage, sponsored by Smith College, which returned the house posts from the Burke aboard the Clipper Odyssey, to the welcoming crowds on the dock at Ketchikan, Alaska. An emotional and healing ceremony was held both in Ketchikan and at the original village site at Gaash, where the Tlingit representatives of the original inhabitants of Gaash, the great-great-granddaughter of E. H. Harriman, and museum representatives honored the ancestors and acknowledged the wrong that had been done.

The Cape Fox corporation has made cedar logs available to the participating museums for the purpose of having new carvings made to replace those that were returned.  The two posts for the Burke Museum were installed in 2005.

The project also received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and gifts from the Ferguson Foundation and several private donors.