
The Alaska State Museum returned to Klukwan four Frog House posts and a replica of the clan’s house screen, treasured cultural artifacts of one of the village’s most powerful clans.
Held in trust and displayed prominently at the state museum for more than 30 years, the Frog House treasures will now be preserved in the Jilkaat Kwaan Heritage Center. There is a plan to unveil them for the public later this month.
“They are embodiments of our history, of our stories, of our culture,” said Lani Hotch, executive director of the heritage center. “There’s been a gaping hole in Klukwan for all the years those things were absent from here,” she said.
The four posts are similarly designed, with frog’s head at the base and its body extending upward; the screen shows a formline design of raven. In Tlingit, such objects are called at.oow, pronounced as at.oowoo in Klukwan, and translated by Hotch as “clan treasures.” When they reentered to the community after more than four decades, Klukwan school children sang songs to greet them.
“The joy that the clan members and the community expressed when the house posts came back-it was so moving to see,” said state museum curator, Steve Henrickson, who accompanied the clan treasures from Juneau.
Canadian art dealer Howard Roloff purchased the Frog House treasures in 1976, an episode in a century-long history of art collectors traveling along the Northwest Coast and acquiring Native art from Chilkat settlements.
Hotch said it was a time when there was pressure on Native communities to give up their customs. “For a long time, you had to renounce tribal ways to vote,” she said.
“I have a sense that art dealers came to Alaska in the summer with rolls of cash in their pockets and went around asking if there were openings to sell. In some cases, they may have preyed upon people,” said Henrickson. “This was of course well before the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act was passed, and before mainstream thinking about cultural treasures like this.”
The selling of Frog and Whale House treasures led to decades-long disputes over rightful ownership, entangled by Native cultural norms and western and indigenous law. Between 1976 and 1980, Haines attorney Linn Asper, represented the village in attempts to reclaim the Frog House artifacts from Roloff. “I was a young lawyer. I’d only been practicing a couple of years,” said Asper. He called it his first big case, one that shaped his entire career. Asper said he believed this was the first case that made it to the Alaska state court that addressed the sale of clan treasures to non-tribal members.
Asper was the only attorney arguing for the Chilkat Indian Village, negotiating with five or six lawyers working for Roloff. At one point in the proceedings, Roloff sued Asper for libel, arguing that he was slandered by Asper in Canadian newspapers. They later dropped the libel charges.
During the same time, the Alaska Native Brotherhood and Sisterhood held a meeting in Klukwan. They passed an ordinance drafted by Asper, preventing the further selling of clan treasures from the village. It became a critical thread that led to the repatriation of Whale House treasures to Klukwan in 1994.
On the day that the Frog House case went to trial, a settlement was reached. Roloff agreed to relinquish four Frog House posts to Klukwan, and a replica of the house screen. Roloff was allowed to keep the original wall screen, and a number of smaller items of Frog House regalia, some of which he had already sold to a woman in Switzerland, according to Asper.
There were two main reasons for these terms of the settlement, said Asper. “There was no precedent saying we even had the rights to stop the sale, and everything was in Canada. We would have had to go to Canada and make the case again, (to get the original screen)” he said. “Nobody got everything they wanted.”
The original screen is housed in the Seattle Art Museum. There are currently no plans to return it to Klukwan, said Hotch. The settlement also determined that the Alaska State Museum was to safeguard the posts and the screen replica, “until we could build a safe place for them in Klukwan,” said Hotch.
The Chilkat Indian Village began fundraising efforts for its own museum in 2005. Through fundraisers, state and federal government grants, and awards from private foundations and charitable trusts, Klukwan raised about $8 million to construct the Jilkaat Kwaan Heritage Center. “This was our number one project, I would say, for 20 years,” said Hotch.
Shortly after the center’s opening, the Alaska State Museum began packing up the Frog House treasures in crates.
“We assumed that the tribe or the center was going to call back for these objects at any time,” Henrickson said.
There was some opposition to bringing the Frog House treasures back to Klukwan. In January of this year, members of the Frog House Clan filed a motion for preliminary injunction in the Juneau Superior Court, seeking to stop the clan treasures from returning to Klukwan. The court ruled in favor of the Chilkat Indian Village, to return the Frog House to Klukwan, which upheld a 1978 court order agreed to by an earlier generation of Frog House elders.
During the past several months, the village and the museum considered dates to return the Frog House treasures to Klukwan. Henrickson and Addison Field, another curator at the museum, brought the clan treasures on the Malaspina ferry. Nine Chilkat Indian Village representatives, members of the Frog and Salmon Hole Houses, and tribal president Kimberley Strong traveled to Juneau to accompany them. From the ferry terminal in Haines, a motorcade of vehicles escorted them back to Klukwan.
Three years before, when the Whale House treasures returned, students in Klukwan wrote papers on what that meant to them. “I read one student’s papers (at the time) and one of the comments that she wrote has always stayed with me. She said she was glad that the Whale House was back in Klukwan. She felt like Klukwan was really Klukwan again. I think that same sentiment applies here,” said Hotch.
“The Frog House is part of the Gaanexteidi (Raven Clan) of Klukwan. It serves as a balance to the Kaagwaantaan (Eagle Clan),” said Strong. “Out of respect to my ancestors, it’s important that we continue the connection and the balance in our community.”
Gaanexteidi men and their Kaagwaantaan wives are said to have traveled from the south to found Klukwan.