Anchorage Museum
Thursday June 16th 2016, 10:56 pm
Filed under: Family,Friends,History,Life

We visited the Anchorage Museum, which is partly sponsored by the Smithsonian: the place was gorgeous (those long vertical strips of wood around the stairwell–so, so pretty) and a lot bigger than I expected.

There were native artifacts and history. There was a piece of oil pipeline. There were representations of native and settler homes and boats from various times. There was the obligatory taxidermied musk ox, “lovingly donated” by the family of the late hunter who had taken the trophy.

I read that and quietly guffawed at the mental image of his family dividing his estate, everyone groaning at all the living room space it would take up, the fact that shooting one was for a time highly illegal (relative to theirs I do not know, I saw no date), and trying to foist the thing on each other with someone finally going, I know! The museum!

Maybe that’s not fair of me, but it amused me.

Almost white, almost plastic-looking waterproof traditional jackets made from tanned Arctic animal intestines for easier weather days out fishing. Coats with fur turned inwards for colder ones, and sometimes, they said, a second coat would be placed over the first. Brrr.

I had resisted pulling out the iPhone, not having seen any pronouncement on cameras being used but knowing they’re usually frowned on, while feeling that my quilter mom just absolutely had to see this gorgeous quilt: it was done in the tiniest pieces of the thinnest hides–I knew she would know just how much work went into that thing. (And Bev, I thought of you, too.) It showed the influence of the Russians who had come for sealskins and converts, mixed with the natives’ own patterns.

I let a certain taller one talk me into their going back upstairs and snapping a photo of it for me.

Then there was the woolly mammoth tusk. We are talking some serious ivory here.

And there was Donna Druchunas‘s Arctic Lace book in the gift shop. I bet it flies off the shelves there, too.


2 Comments so far
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And seeing it all in place, not thousands of miles away in the Smithsonian in DC. How fantastic!

Comment by twinsetellen 06.18.16 @ 5:03 pm

The ivory/tusks…one of my uncles hauled road construction materials for the Alaskan highway in the early days 50’s & 60’s. He had in his Wisconsin home one of those tusks. He said the graders would turn them up/over regularly, but by the time he would get back with another load of gravel, it would be buried again. He managed to get one.

Comment by Helen 06.20.16 @ 1:37 pm



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