FORT COLLINS — A Colorado State University art professor shares a special kinship with the American Indians she grew up with in Alaska and is helping preserve and celebrate their unique art form.
Emily Moore is using the printed word and video to explore a period between 1938 to 1942, when the U.S. government paid American Indians to restore or replicate 19th-century totem poles. The effort saved
Prior to the work done by the Civilian Conservation Corps, American Indians had been encouraged by missionaries and others to burn their totem poles.
“It was the largest act of government patronage of Native American art in the 20th century, and it’s never really been studied,” said Moore, who was formally adopted into the Tlingit Kiks.adi clan. “It was an about-face in government policy, an effort to preserve history that had been condemned. And you saw this transformation in the government officials, from a very prejudicial viewpoint where they called Native people ‘squaws’ and questioned their competence to a place where some of them actually became friends with Native carvers.”
Even today, Moore said, totem poles are still not considered great art by many who see them as kitschy tools to reel in tourists.
But Moore said the totems are taken seriously by those who carve and display them. “They are seen as diaries or narratives of a tribe’s history and are important benchmarks to an entire people,” Moore said.
The 36-year-old Moore, an assistant professor in CSU’s Department of Art and Art History, received a $6,000 National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Stipend Award this year to help her to document the government’s work in rebuilding and saving totem poles. That included relocating them to six “totem parks.”
Those parks are now tourist draws. The Ketchikan Daily News reported that in 2013 the Saxman totem park received 100,000 visitors annually, which is considerable, considering Alaska’s total population is just over 500,000.
Moore grew up in Ketchikan, which is home to two of the six totem parks. She also has worked closely with the Tlingit and Haida tribes to preserve this chapter in their history.
This project began as her dissertation while earning a doctorate in art history from the University of California.
Moore found that the totems also helped the tribes lay claim to the lands that had become the . Each totem pole relates to a story about clan history and was often grounded in particular places that the clan used and owned.
Those oral histories — and the totem poles that recorded them — were used as legal evidence that the Tlingit and Haida deserved compensation for the federal government’s 1909 takeover of those lands, a settlement they finally received in the 1960s
Moore’s book — “For Future Generations: Tlingit, Haida and American Art in Alaska’s New Deal Totem Parks” — is expected to be finished next summer.
