Treasure Hunting

Jan 17

What If You Found a Relic From A Dying Culture… and Could Give It Back?

If you inherited a unique and significant relic from a dying culture and no one knew you had it, would you give it back?

Marilyn Lewis of Port Townsend, Washington had the opportunity to answer that question last year when she inherited a Shaman’s mask with the faint inscription “Taken from a medicine man’s grave on King Island.” Her answer to the question: “yes.”

The story goes like this: In 1898 Lewis’ great uncle Nate traveled by steamship from Seattle to Alaska to try his luck in the Gold Rush. After spending three years there, working as a bartender and apparently not finding any gold, Nate went back home. He kept notes from his time in Alaska but no mention was ever made of King Island. In 1927 Nate gave the mask to Lewis’ father, Bill. For the next four decades the mask remained in the Lewis family. Until last year when Bill passed the mask on to Marilyn, asking if she would find where it came from.

Online research led Lewis to an abandoned Inupiat Eskimo village, littered with crumbling homes perched high on stilts. The people of King Island have long since re-located 80 miles southeast of the Bering Sea island to Alaska’s western coast, and all that remains of their culture is struggling to survive in the city of Nome. Lewis personally took the wooden mask with red-ochre face, beaked nose and black painted hair, to Alaska and delivered it to Tribal Coordinator of the King Island Native Community, Charlene Saclamana.

Saclamana said: “It gives me and my family something tangible from our past. We’ve lost so much of the culture. We were eager to have the mask back in our possession. We never had anything that well preserved from the island.”

Currently, the mask resides in an Alaskan museum and will be included in an exhibit featuring the style and ingenuity of ancient Bering Sea Eskimos. It serves as a significant piece of history and stands as a symbol of hope for King Island culture.

Would you have put as much effort into returning a relic you inherited? And where would you have started your research? Check out the original article and learn more about the King Island culture at Anchorage Daily News Online.