From the land of the totem poles: The Northwest Coast Indian art collection at the American Museum of Natural History [Hardcover]

Aldona Jonaitis (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: 1988

In 1943 French anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss arrived in New York City, along with countless refugees from the war in Europe. He became a frequent visitor to the North Pacific Hall at the American Museum of Natural History where he could lose himself in what he affectionately called "a magic place where the dreams of childhood hold a rendezvous, where century-old tree trunks sing and speak, where undefinable objects watch out for the visitor, with the anxious stare of human faces, where animals of superhuman gentleness join their little paws like hands in prayer." Two and a half million people now visit the Museum each year to share in these enchantments.

The American Museum houses the most extensive collection of Northwest Coast Indian art in existence. It includes material from virtually every Indian group that once lived along the west coast of British Columbia and Alaska. In this book, Dr. Aldona Jonaitis traces the history of this magnificent collection, beginning in the late nineteenth century before those coastal peoples had much contact with Europeans, and their customs, languages, and art were still intact. Shortly after the collections was formed, between 1880 and 1910, Indian culture in this region went into a severe decline, to be revived a half century later as another generation of North Americans discovered their heritage.

The story alternately captivates and distresses. Populations were decimated by disease in the last years of the nineteenth century, art objects left their makers' hands bound for museums all over the world, traditional rituals were outlawed, and governments exerted strong pressures on the Indians to become assimilated. On the other side of the story are the individuals--like Franz Boas, under whose direction much of the Museum collection was assembled, Lt. George Thornton Emmons, who immersed himself in the native cultures, George Hunt, prized Kwakiutl informant for Boas and other researchers, and Charles Edenshaw, master Haida carver and painter--whose colorful lives intersect the Age of Museum Collecting.

Artifacts in the American Museum come alive through the details Dr. Jonaitis provides of their cultural context, their traditional uses, and their acquisition by collectors. Viewers see spoons and bowls that held food eaten by Boas at a potlatch; feel the spirit power emanating from a shaman's charm removed from its owner's grave by Lieutenant Emmons; sense the sadness behind the display of family crests on a house model carved by Edenshaw.

Nearly 100 color plates in the book and numerous historical photographs from the Museum's archives recall a bygone era and are a tribute to the stunning artworks of the North Pacific region. Dr. Jonaitis has written the first book devoted solely to the collection of Northwest Coast Indian art in the American Museum of Natural History. As such, the book is both an essential work for scholars and a valuable resource for the general reader.

--This text refers to the Paperback edition.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

As the Northwest Coast Indian tribes fell victim to extermination and exploitation by white settlers, as well as to smallpox, venereal disease and alcoholism, acquisitive collectors and anthropologists rushed to British Columbia and Alaska, starting around 1880, to preserve the artistic remnants of a rapidly vanishing culture. Written by an art historian at State University of New York, this album focuses on how the American Museum of Natural History built its extensive Northwest Indian collection. The star performer is anthropologist Franz Boas, who challenged the negative stereotyping of Amerindians and championed their art. Boas attacked museum exhibitions that robbed native pieces of their social-cultural context, which, ironically, is a shortcoming to which this volume ultimately succumbs. For example, the text has a few brief, scattered references to totem poles. Among the first 200 first-rate illustrations are shamans' masks and charms as well as canoes and household objects made with rare artistry.
Copyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal

Enhanced by a text that places each artifact in its cultural context and explains its use, this work is far more than a catalog of the American Museum of Natural History's extensive collection of Northwest Coast Indian art. Jonaitis has compiled a sampling of hundreds of items, using biographies of the early anthropologists that visited Northwest Coast tribes to outline the rites they discovered, and framing her account with old and new photographs of the masks, vessels, and images used in spiritual and physical life. A brief history of the museum is also given. Highly recommended for libraries in the Northwest and for strong Native American collections. David Bryant, Belleville P.L.,
Copyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 269 pages
• Publisher: University of Washington Press; First Edition edition (1988)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 029596572X
• ISBN-13: 978-0295965727
• Product Dimensions: 12 x 9.4 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 4.5 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,961,124 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Stunning photographs, solid scholarship, September 16, 2010

By 

Althea (Olympic Peninsula, WA) - See all my reviews

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This review is from: From the Land of the Totem Poles: The Northwest Coast Indian Art Collection at the American Museum of Natural History (Paperback)

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.

5.0 out of 5 stars Great Transaction, November 25, 2011

By 

John C. Weschler (Washington state, USA) - See all my reviews

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This review is from: From the land of the totem poles: The Northwest Coast Indian art collection at the American Museum of Natural History (Hardcover)

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.