March 28, 4-5 PM in Foster Auditorium, 102 Paterno Library

DR. JEN ROSE SMITH

On Finding Emptiness: The Harriman Alaska Expedition of 1899 and dAXunhyuuga’

Jen Rose Smith (dAXunhyuu/Eyak) is an assistant professor of Geography and American Indian Studies at the University of Washington. She works at the intersection of critical Indigenous studies, cultural human geography, and environmental humanities. Her forthcoming book Icy Matters takes up race, indigeneity, and coloniality in ice-geographies. She serves on the advisory board for the Eyak Cultural Foundation, a non-profit that organizes annual language and cultural revitalization gatherings and directs a Cultural Mapping Project in their homelands of Eyak, Alaska.

Her talk traces out the ways that her archival research regarding the Harriman Alaska Expedition of 1899 intersects with her community’s language revitalization efforts. She reflects on archival research on what is easy to find, what gets lost, and the desires of research to fill the many versions of emptiness that coloniality enacts.

Dr. Smith’s talk will be followed by the preview of a new digital project featuring artifacts from the Harriman Alaska expedition housed at Penn State’s Eberly Family Special Collections Library

This collection documents the Harriman Alaska Expedition of 1899 from the perspective of the expedition’s chaplain, the Reverend George F. Nelson. This collection includes Nelson’s private travel diary, two souvenir photograph albums, and Indigenous artworks that Nelson obtained during the expedition. Nelson’s diary, now transcribed for the first time, is a complicated artifact of colonial intrusion and nonconsensual resource extraction in the Indigenous lands and waters of Alaska at the end of the nineteenth century. 

What was the Harriman Alaska Expedition of 1899?

Chaplain George F. Nelson accompanied the railroad executive Edward H. Harriman and his family on a leisure and scientific cruise to Alaska in the summer of 1899. The expedition brought together 25 scientists, including glaciologist John Muir and naturalist John Burroughs; three artists, including the ornithological artist Louis Agassiz Fuertes and painter Frederick Dellenbaugh; and a photographer, Edward S. Curtis. Their written accounts and visual depictions of the expedition reflect colonial economic expansion in Alaska at the salmon canneries, gold mines, and fur industries along the southeastern coast.

At mission schools in Metlakatla, Sitka, and Yakutat, the expedition witnessed and sometimes participated in the oppression of Indigenous children by Christian missionary institutions. The expedition raided a Saanya Kwaan Tlingit village that they believed to be “abandoned,” cutting down approximately ten sacred totem poles for distribution to colonial museums on the U.S. east coast. These totem poles have since been repatriated after the Saanya Kwaan Tlingit submitted claims to the U.S. federal government through the Native American Graves and Repatriation Act of 1990.