USNM Number

Object Name

Object Type

Culture/People

Collection Date

Collector

Accession Date

Country

State

City

Accession Number

Notes

From card: "For fighting bear. Double ended knife, grip wrapped with rawhide; blades corrugated, of steel and copper. Heirloom in the bear family Tag way ta, of the Hootz ah tai Kwan. Through many generations. In wooden case. Scabbard of hide. Illus. in The Far North catalog, Nat. Gall. of Art, 1973, p. 261. Loaned to the National Gallery of Art October 20, 1972. Returned 5-29-73. Loan: Crossroads Sep 22 1988. Loan returned Jan 21 1993. Illus.: Crossroads of Continents catalogue; Fig. 311, p. 232." Crossroads of Continents photo caption identifies: "The sculptured pommel ... is a split profile image of a sea-grizzly, inlaid with abalone shell."Per Repatriation Office research, as reported in the Tlingit case report (Hollinger et al. 2005), in 1903 Emmons purchased this dagger from a member of the Teikweidi clan in Killisnoo or Angoon, Alaska, with Angoon the more likely provenance. In a letter dated August 20, 1903 in the accession file, Emmons talks about this knife and says that it "... had come into the hands of a nephew of an old chief upon the death of the latter." He identifies it as ornamented to represent the bear, which he says is the totemic emb[lem] of the Teikweidi "family" (i.e. clan) of the Hootz ah tai Kwan/Hootz-[ah-tai]-qwan (i.e. Hutsnuwu Tlingit), living on Admiralty Island. The Admiralty Island location gives credence to the probable Angoon attribution.Source of the information below: Smithsonian Arctic Studies Center Alaska Native Collections: Sharing Knowledge website, by Aron Crowell, entry on this artifact http://alaska.si.edu/record.asp?id=297 , retrieved 2-13-2022: Dagger, Tlingit.