From card: "For sewing work."Round container with baleen sides and wooden bottom; has a lid with wooden top and baleen sides. Resembles a round New England bentwood pantry box, with tacked/nailed joints. Box lid has two attached labels in James G. Swan's hand: "No 19 50¢. Masset B.C., Procured by J. G. Swan June 19, 1883", and "Whale bone box made by a Masset Indian and fastened with rivets of native copper in imitation of box made in Nantucket Mas."

Object has two catalogue cards. From older card: "Button Blanket, Dancing Shirt of "Bear Skin." Design - the totem of the bear. Very fine. Made of red wool, with design outlined in small white buttons." From newer card: "Appliqued tunic. Collector's tag: 'Dancing shirt of 'Bear Skin', a Skidegate chief of Haida Indians, Queen Charlotte Islands. July 1888. The design is the totem of the bear and is a fine specimen of Indian work. The effect when worn at night with torch or lamp light is very fine. Difficult to obtain. $25.00.' Red wool applique on dark blue blanket cloth with shell button outlining."This object is on loan to the Anchorage Museum at Rasmuson Center, from 2010 through 2027.Source of the information below: Smithsonian Arctic Studies Center Alaska Native Collections: Sharing Knowledge website, by Aron Crowell, entry on the artifact http://www.alaska.si.edu/record.asp?id=645, retrieved 5-6-2012: Tunic, Haida. This late nineteenth-century dance tunic is made of red wool appliqué on black wool cloth and shows a bear crest design outlined in small shell buttons. The sleeves are red cotton with lace ruffles at the cuffs. Collector James Swan purchased it from Bear Skin, a Skidegate chief. Haida artists invented appliqué dance blankets and tunics around 1850, ornamenting them with dentalium shells, mother of pearl buttons, and squares of abalone shell. Florence Davidson said that they were first made in Masset after a missionary forbade the raising of totem poles; the blankets and tunics were an alternative way for people to show their clan crests.

Catalog card says that this was sent as an exchange to F.W. Galpin in 1907, but this is apparently incorrect, since the whistle remains in the NMNH collection.

Bone carved to represent a whale and decorated with abalone inlay and incised formline designs.This object is on loan to the Anchorage Museum at Rasmuson Center, from 2010 through 2027.Source of the information below: Smithsonian Arctic Studies Center Alaska Native Collections: Sharing Knowledge website, by Aron Crowell, entry on this artifact, listed as number E9813B, http://www.alaska.si.edu/record.asp?id=508, retrieved 4-24-2012: Amulet, Tsimshian. A shaman's amulets represented the guardian spirits that aided his work. Like his wooden rattles, crown of bear claws, dance apron, and red ocher face paint, bone and stone amulets were essential to his practice. This beautifully carved example represents a killer whale; its tail is a long-beaked bird.

From card: "Recent adaptation of old designs to modern weaving. Designs conventionalized and colored. See Drucker, "Indians of the NW Coast", p. 84, more likely of Salish (rather than Haida) origin." Described on p. 125, cat. entry 90, of Salish Weaving by Paula Gustafson, Univ. of Washington Press, 1980 as: "Fibres: Warp is vegetable fibre; weft is commercial knitting yarn. Colour: Red, yellow, black, green and white. Weave: Twine. History: Blanket. Provenance and collector not known. May be Bella Coola."Karen Anderson (Nuxalk elder), Ian Reid (Heiltsuk), Clyde Tallio (Nuxalk), and Jennifer Kramer (anthropologist) of the delegation from Bella Bella, Bella Coola and Rivers Inlet communities of British Columbia made the following comments during the Recovering Voices Community Research Visit May 20th - 24th, 2013. This object could possibly be a child's cape, used for the salmon ceremony or used as a modern day welcome mat. The border of the cape tells one where you come from, your rank, and where you fit into society. These crescent shapes are frequently associated with Salish, but Bella Coola is know for being a mixture of Northern and Southern styles.

Listed on page 41 in "The Exhibits of the Smithsonian Institution at the Panama-Pacific International Exposition, San Francisco, California, 1915", in section "Arts of the Northwest Coast Tribes".