Rosita Worl

In 1982, the fledgling Native nonprofit Sealaska Heritage Institute held a dance-and-culture festival to celebrate the Tlingit, Haida, and Tsimshian cultures of Southeast Alaska. A couple of hundred Native people gathered in Juneau for the event, called Celebration. They could not have imagined then that Celebration woud spark a movement across the region - a renaissance of Native culture that prompted people largely unfamiliar with their heritage to learn their ancestral songs and dances and to make regalia for future Celebrations. Today, Celebration is the largest cultural event in the state, drawing thousands of people to the five-day biennial festival. Celebration: Tlingit, Haida, Tsimshian Dancing on the Land, featuring the work by the noted Alaska photographer Bill Hess, includes images from the first Celebrations to the present-day festivals. It is both an introduction to Native cultures and a cherished keepsake for the people who have participated in Celebration. Sealaska Heritage Institute is a regional Native nonprofit organization serving the indigenous peoples of Southeast Alaska. The Institute was founded in 1980 to administer cultural programs for Sealaska Corporation, a Native for-profit company formed under the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act. The Institute's mission is to perpetuate and enhance Tlingit, Haida, and Tsimshian cultures.

"Feeding the Ancestors" presents an exquisite group of carved spoons from the Pacific Northwest that resides in the collections of Harvard's Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology. Carved from the horns of mountain goats and Dall sheep, and incorporating elements of abalone shell and metal, most of the spoons were collected in Alaska in the late nineteenth century and were made and used by members of the Tlingit tribe. Hillel Burger's beautiful color photographs reveal every nuance of the carvers' extraordinary artistry. Anne-Marie Victor-Howe introduces the collectors and describes the means by which these and other ethnographic objects were acquired. In the process, she paints a vivid picture of the "Last Frontier" just before and shortly after the United States purchased Alaska. A specialist in the ethnography of the Native peoples of the Northwest Coast, Victor-Howe provides a fascinating glimpse into these aboriginal subsistence cultures as she explains the manufacture and function of traditional spoons. Her accounts of the clan stories associated with specific carvings and of the traditional shamanic uses of spoons are the result of extensive consultation with Tlingit elders, scholars, and carvers." Feeding the Ancestors" is the first scholarly study of traditional feast spoons and a valuable contribution to our knowledge of Pacific Northwest Coast peoples and their art.