A Chilkat Robe Returns to Southeast Alaska, but SHI Needs Help Identifying It

In the basement of the Walter Soboleff Building, Emily Galgano recently opened a huge white closet. She pulled out a long drawer, containing a Chilkat robe. The colors of the cloak have faded.

“So it could be very old, but also not so old. I assume they are at least 100 to 150 years old,” she said. “But it’s difficult to say exactly.”

In May, a museum in Wisconsin sent a Chilkat robe it had owned for 80 years to the Sealaska Heritage Institute in Juneau to determine which clan it belongs to and hopefully return it to them.

Galgano is director of archives and collections at the Sealaska Hertiage Institute. She said the cloak is a design of a diving whale. Some of the black color has faded to purple and rust. Other spots are still rich and dark, which may indicate a different batch of dye.

Wearing gloves, Galgano turned a corner of the robe to reveal colors that much more closely resembled what they would have looked like when the robe was new: dark black and bright yellow.

Earlier this month, the cloak was on display during Celebration. Galgano had hoped people would see it and know something about its origins.

“We’re always working with the community to crowdsource that kind of information,” she said. “This is the first time I’ve done something with an object like this, which is of this size, but we have done similar, smaller projects.”

The cloak was borrowed from the Rahr-West Museum in Manitowoc, Wisconsin. Greg Vadney, the museum’s executive director, said they don’t have anything else; he believes it came to the museum in the 1940s from someone who had served in the U.S. Coast Guard in Alaska.

“We don’t have anything else that we know of that even comes from the Pacific Northwest, let alone tribal culture in Alaska,” Vadney said. “We were happy that we could return him to his home. And we’re also very excited that hopefully, while it’s at Sealaska Heritage, some of the gaps in the history that we don’t know about – some of those details can be filled in in this collaboration.”

He said the idea to contact SHI came from Manitowoc artist Skip Wallen designed the whale sculpture at Juneau’s Overstreet Park.

Vadney said Rahr-West would like to return the mantle to its original owners.

“Certainly as a museum, unfortunately, we often look at things as things and forget about their material culture and the human element,” he said. “And in this case the spiritual element inherent in it.”

The mantle is on loan to SHI for the coming year, but could remain in Juneau long-term while the organizations decide next steps.

“Our thought process is, this is a step toward repatriation,” Vadney said.

Galgano said SHI’s next step will be to gather expert weavers to study the cloak.

“If it belongs to a clan, and it’s something like at.oo – where it’s an object owned by the clan – then we also have a process where clans can lend items here long-term, which we still take care of . It will still be in our climate-controlled vault and managed here, but it won’t belong to the museum, and they can then view it for ceremonies, things like ku.eek,” she said.

Galgano said she wants anyone who thinks they have information about the mantle to make an appointment to come see it by emailing her at [email protected].