From left, conservation intern AnnMarie Guerin and Alaska State Museum Conservationist Ellen Carlee inspect a pole, donated to Ketchikan’s Totem Heritage Center by Tsimshian master carver David Boxley. (Photo by Leila Kheiry)
Ketchikan’s Totem Heritage Center has a new pole – relatively speaking. It’s actually 30 years old, but the pole is a new addition to the center’s collection of historic Alaska Native artifacts. Alaska State Museum conservators from Juneau came to town to help clean and preserve the pole, and find out what kind of stories might be hidden in the wood.
Ellen Carlee has a tiny lump of metal twisted up in a piece of paper. She’s been trying to find someone who knows what it is.
She shows it to John Radzilowski, a summer guide at the center, who also happens to be a history professor at Ketchikan’s University of Alaska Southeast campus. He doesn’t know, either, so she puts it away for the moment.
The Boxley pole where that bit of metal was found is a 30-year-old totem pole, donated to the center by master carver David Boxley.
Carlee is based in Juneau, and says she got a call last summer from two Heritage Center employees.
“They said, ‘Hey, we’re under a house in Metlakatla looking at this totem pole, it’s covered with lichen, we think it has an infestation problem. David Boxley wants to donate it to the museum. What do you think we should do?’” she said. “I’m like, ‘Well, I’m in Fred Meyer right now, but here’s what I think.’”
Now, a year later, Carlee and two graduate-level conservation interns have flown to
Ellen Carlee points out a detail on a 30-year-old totem pole, donated to Ketchikan’s Totem Heritage Center by the carver, David Boxley. (Photo by Leila Kheiry)
Ketchikan to clean the pole, and get it ready for eventual display. She says the artist didn’t really want the pole restored – just preserved.
I asked how long it had been under the house.
“Not very long, only a couple of years,” she said. “One of the things that was interesting to me is the thing had a ton of lichen on it. … This was very lettucy, leafy, greenish and greish lichen, and it had lots of dirt under the lichen.”
The cleaning process is meticulous. They had to remove the lichen without damaging the paint. As they gently nudged the vegetation away, that’s when they found the imbedded lumps of metal.
“It looked like it may be some sort of pellet,” she said. “Now that we cleaned it, we’ve seen this in a couple of spots. This pole stood outside the Boxley family home for decades, so probably I should send a picture of this to somebody from Metlakatla and say, what is this? What was it doing in the pole? Because that’s part of the story.”
As Carlee and I talked, intern AnnMarie Guerin carefully wielded a bamboo skewer, scraping remaining bits of lichen tendrils from the pole’s many cracks.
AnnMarie Guerin carefully scrapes lichen tendrils from the cracks of an old totem pole. (Photo by Leila Kheiry)
“So, I’ll just test it and see if maybe it’s falling off on its own, and if it is, then I keep going, but if it’s stubborn, I just kind of let it be,” she explained. “I would definitely call it meditative. That was one of the reasons I wanted to get into conservation. I knew there was a lot of meticulous and long-term work, and I know I liked doing that kind of thing. So, I could spend hours doing this. It’s great!”
We left her, happily poking at the pole with her skewer.
And remember that mysterious tiny lump of metal? Well, as Carlee and I were walking out of the Totem Heritage Center, Anita Maxwell – senior curator of programs there – joined us to say that Radzilowski had found out what it is.
“It is from a pellet gun,” Maxwell said. “There’s a specific kind of hollow-core lead pellet, and he even has the website to buy some more. Google is amazing.”
Now that we know, the next step is to find out how it got there. So, I called the artist and asked whether he had any little neighbor kids who liked to shoot BB guns.
“Oh, I’m pretty sure that’s where that came from,” he said, laughing. “There’s lots of little neighbor kids without a whole lot of supervision.”
Boxley says he carved the pole in 1982 to coincide with a potlatch he organized in honor of his grandparents, who raised him. He says it wasn’t the first pole he ever
A detail from the historic pole donated to the Totem Heritage Center by its carver, Tsimshian artist David Boxley. (Photo by Leila Kheiry)
carved, but it was the first large one, for the first potlatch in that community.
“The actual putting on of the potlatch, I didn’t have a lot of help because our people had not had one up to then, and I’d never even seen one, been at one. It was all research,” he said. “A few people in my family and a few people from the other clans helped put it together. It was something I had to do.”
While a replacement pole, carved by Boxley and his son, has gone up in the first pole’s place, Boxley says the original is important to the history of Tsimshian Native culture in Metlakatla.
“It was kind of the symbol of the revitalization of potlatching in Metlakatla,” he said. “It was the first one: first potlatch; first ceremony; first pole-raising.”
Much of the Native culture had been left behind, he says, when the first residents followed the missionary, Father William Duncan, from British Columbia in 1891. But, that has changed over the last three decades.
“The education process has been slow, but it’s come a long way,” Boxley said. “I’m pretty proud of my people for everything they’ve done. All the other clans, all the artists who are doing their best.”
And through the pole that Boxley donated, the history and significance of an event that started that revitalization will be preserved for generations to come.
