Customer Reviews

From the Land of the Totem Poles: The Northwest Coast Indian Art Collection at the American Museum of Natural History

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This is more than the average coffee-table book about Northwest Coast Indian art. It is lavishly and beautifully illustrated with color photographs by Stephen Myers and historical black-and-white photographs from the Museum's collection. The text by Aldona Jonaitis is an outstanding examination of intercultural conditions along the Coast, from the late 1700's when Captain Cook first arrived at Nootka Sound to the present.
The life stories of the collectors and anthropologists who lived among the tribes are intriguing, though at times the "collecting" seems more like theft, as in the case of George Emmons who had few compunctions against taking artifacts from Tlingit shaman's gravesites.
The book is more a history of the Musuem collection--how it was acquired and who did the financing and the gathering and the exhibiting--than it is a history of the native people who created the art itself. That history, oral in nature, has been somewhat obscured by the fogs of time, and Jonaitis only picks up the thread of it with the arrival of the first European explorers, when the written history began.
It could be considered tragic that these tools, implements, masks, charms, were removed from cultural context and lost the meaning inherent in thier use, and became pieces of "art" that now languish in the storage vaults of the Museum. But it's better to be grateful, I suppose, that they were preserved and that we can see them and be inspired by their beauty. They are indeed objects of great beauty, and the way that they are presented here is respectful and knowledgeable.

Vendor did an OUTSTANDING job in preparing this collectible edition for shipment. I received the book in a timely manner and I am completely satisfied.