A totem pole carved over half a century ago by Chilkoot artists is coming home. It has started on a cross country trip and will arrive in the Chilkat valley in the near future. The totem was property of a national airline company, and has sat in Georgia for decades.

 

 

Work on the totem pole was documented in an old black and white photo. It shows a group of carvers hunched over the pole, apparently putting the finishing touches on a large face. A sign reads Chilkoot Indian Carvers, the picture is dated March 1969. 

Chilkoot Indian Association Tribal Administrator Harriet Brouillette says she recognizes the carvers in the picture.

Brouillette: “I see Wes Willard in the photo, and John Hagen, and Carl Heinmiller.”

The photo was sent to Brouillette by Delta Air Lines. The company contacted her last summer..

Brouillette: “They said that they had a pole that was made by AIA”

That is Haines nonprofit Alaska Indian Arts.

Brouillette: “they believe in the 60s, the pole was built in California during a tourism conference, and the pole has been sitting in a warehouse in Georgia.”   

The pole has been at the Delta Flight Museum in Atlanta, Georgia. The museum staff contacted Brouillette, wanting to return the pole. On the museum’s website, the director of exhibits writes that museum staff felt the pole was out of place in an aeronautics museum, and should be interpreted by a “cultural institution with expertise in Western indigenous people’s history.”

The museum contacted Brouillette and offered to ship the pole to Haines.

Brouillette: “And this couldn’t have happened at a better time, because we had just received the parade ground back, with the tribal house.”

Brouillette refers to a grassy field in Fort Seward in Haines. In the middle of it is a traditional building that has been decaying for years. The Chilkoot Indian Association has recently received funds from the National Park Service to rebuild the tribal house. Brouillette says this will be a great place to display the pole. The pole, informally referred to as the Delta Air Lines pole, is 14 feet tall. Two faces are carved at the bottom, a beaver sits on top of them.

Lee Heinmiller is the director of Alaska Indian Arts. He has some insights into the history of the pole. In his youth, Heinmiller was part of the Chilkat Dancers, a traditional dance troupe. They would travel far and wide to showcase ‘Lingit culture.

Heinmiller: “When we used to travel with the dancers and the carvers, we used to take a pole that was partly finished, to the world’s fair, or to trade and travel shows, and dance and carve on the pole and finish it there, and then the airline would end up keeping the pole for providing us with the transportation.”

According to the Delta Flight Museum’s website, the pole was a gift to Western Airlines, and sat in front of their headquarters in Los Angeles until 1987, when Western Airlines merged with Delta. Delta then shipped the pole to its Atlanta museum.

In photos, the pole appears well preserved.The red paint seems faded. Heinmiller says it has probably been repainted.

Heinmiller: “It’s got some green on it, that looks way more forest green than the blue green that we would use normally. So I’m guessing somewhere along the line, over 30 or 40 years someone must have repainted it, or at least they repainted the blue, because the blue is the color that fades out the fastest.”

Brouillette says she has been making arrangements with the Atlanta museum to ship the totem pole. 

Brouillette: “Once we settled on transportation and crating, we picked a date, and the pole was packed up yesterday, and is now on its way.”

The pole is currently on a truck to Seattle, from there it will travel by barge to Haines. Because it is relatively short, Brouillette says it will fit well in the tribal house once it is renovated.

Heinmiller says there are other poles like it around the country, with a similar history.

Heinmiller: “I know there’s a couple of smaller ones, and the big one that we did that Alaska Airlines kept, I’m not sure where that one is. In the last couple of years a couple of poles we’ve done over the years have resurfaced in somebody’s possession and they’ve written to us and said ‘when was this done, so and so bought it in the early ‘70s, so i end up going back through the files and trying to trace that.”

Heinmiller says he can in theory find out when a pole was carved.

Heinmiller: “We have pictures of most of that stuff, and details on who worked on them. They are all labeled but it’s kind of a huge pile to go through for fifty years worth of boxes.”

Brouillette says structural work on the tribal house should be completed by the end of next summer. She says replacing the carvings should take one or two more years.