CATALOGUE IDENTIFIES AS SEAL GUT BUT FRAN REED THINKS IT COULD BE BEAR GUT, 2/1999.Provenience note: Anthropology catalogue ledger book lists a locality of Alaska for E67931 - 68019. Catalogue cards list a locality of Sitka. Alaska. It is unclear which is correct, though it is probable that the collection was purchased in Sitka.

IDENTIFIED BY PETER MACDONALD, GUEST CURATOR OF THE "DOWN FROM THE SHIMMERING SKY" EXHIBITION, VANCOUVER ART GALLERY, 1998, AS "ARCHAIC HEILTSUK". BASED ON THIS IDENTIFICATION, WILLIAM STURTEVANT, CURATOR OF NORTH AMERICAN ETHNOLOGY, DECIDED TO UPDATE THE PERMANENT COMPUTER RECORD AND STORE THE OBJECT AS "BELLA BELLA". IDENTIFIED AS MASK REPRESENTING MALE ANCESTOR, C. 1845, BELLA BELLA, ON P. 189 IN DOWN FROM THE SHIMMERING SKY BY PETER MACNAIR, VANCOUVER ART GALLERY, 1998.Ian Reid (Heiltsuk) 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 was specifically a dance mask, there's a spruce root bite place. It is made of alder and spruce.For more information, see pdf of additional documentation on the Gibbs collections provided by Liz Hammond-Kaarremaa which is filed with the Emu accession/transaction record.

Identified by collector as a leather dressing tool, but this object is in the form of a stirrup maul or hammer.

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.

From card: "Black slate; portion of a longer crowded figure pipe with fractured ends smoothed; totemic animal figures well carved."