A mystery Chilkat robe returns to Southeast Alaska

In the basement of Juneau’s Walter Soboleff Building on a recent afternoon, Emily Galgano opened a huge white cabinet. She pulled out a long drawer with a Chilkat robe laying inside. The robe’s colors are faded. 

“So it could be very old, or it could be less old. I’m assuming at least 100, 150 years old,” she said. “But it’s hard to say exactly.”

In May, a Wisconsin museum sent a Chilkat robe that it’s had for the last 80 years to Sealaska Heritage Institute in Juneau to identify which clan it belongs to and, hopefully, give it back to them. 

Galgano is the institute’s archives and collections director. She said the robe is a diving whale design. Some of the black coloring has faded to purple and rust. Other spots are still rich and dark, which could indicate a different batch of dye. 

With gloves on, Galgano flipped a corner of the robe to reveal colors much closer to how they might have looked when the robe was new: dark blacks and bright yellows. 

Earlier this month, the robe was on display during Celebration. Galgano had hoped that people might see it and know something about its origins. 

“We’re always working with the community to try and crowdsource that sort of information,” she said. “This is the first time I’ve done something with an object like this, that’s of this scale — but we have done similar, smaller projects.”

The robe is on loan from the Rahr-West Museum in Manitowoc, Wisconsin. Greg Vadney, the museum’s executive director, said they don’t have anything else like it — he believes it came to the museum in the 1940s from someone who served in the U.S. Coast Guard in Alaska.

“We have nothing else that we know that even comes from the Pacific Northwest, let alone Alaskan tribal culture,” Vadney said. “So we were excited to be able to return it to its home. And we’re also very excited that hopefully, while it’s at Sealaska Heritage, some of the gaps in the history that we don’t know about — some of that detail can get filled in in this partnership.”

He said the idea to reach out to SHI came from Manitowoc artist Skip Wallen, who designed the  whale sculpture in Juneau’s Overstreet Park.

Vadney said Rahr-West is eager to return the robe to its original owners. 

“Certainly as a museum, oftentimes we kind of, unfortunately, look at the things as things, and forget about the material culture of it and the human element,” he said. “And in this case, the spiritual element that is inherent to it.”

The robe is on loan to SHI for the next year, but it could stay in Juneau long-term while the organizations decide next steps. 

“Our thought process is, this is a step towards repatriation,” Vadney said. 

Galgano said SHI’s next step will be gathering expert weavers to study the robe. 

“If it belongs to a clan, and it’s something like at.oo — where it’s a clan-owned object — then we also have a process where clans can long-term loan items here, where we’ll still care for it. It’ll still be in our climate-controlled vault and taken care of here, but it won’t belong to the museum, and they can then check it out for ceremonies, things like ku.eek,” she said.

Galgano said she wants anyone who may have information about the robe to make an appointment and come see it, by emailing her at emily.pastore@sealaska.com.