Alaska -- Antiquities; Eskimos; Eskimos -- Anthropometry; Indians of North America -- Alaska; Indians of North America -- Yukon
_Auk Point._--Thanks to Father Kashevaroff and Mr. Charles H. Flory,
the district forester, an excursion was arranged one day to Auk Point,
approximately 15 miles distant, a picturesque wooded little promontory
near which there used to be a settlement of the Auk Indians. On the
point were several burials of shamans and a chief of the tribe (all
other dead being cremated), and near the graves stood until a short
time ago a moderate-sized totem pole. Of all this we found but bare
remnants. The burials of three shamans and one chief had been in huge
boxes above ground; but they had all been broken into and most of the
contents belonging to the dead were taken away, including the skulls.
The skeletal parts of two of the bodies and a few bones of the chief
remained, however, with a few objects the vandals had overlooked. The
latter were placed in the Juneau Museum while the bones, showing some
features of interest, were collected and sent to Washington. A large
painted board near the graves of the shamans remained, though damaged.
The totem pole, however, had been cut down the year before by a young
man from Juneau, who then severed the head, which he carried home,
and left the rest on the beach, from where it was soon washed away.
Thus a group of burials, the only ones known of the once good-sized Auk
tribe, have been despoiled and their record lost to science. And such a
fate is, according to all accounts, rapidly overtaking similar remains
everywhere in southeastern Alaska.
_Rare stone lamp (?)._--At the museum one of the first and most
interesting objects shown the writer by Father Kashevaroff was a
large, heavy, finely sculptured oblong bowl, made of hard, dark
crystalline stone, decorated in relief on the rim and with a squatting
stone figure, cut from the same piece, near one of the ends. The
bowl looks like a ceremonial lamp, though showing no trace of oil or
carbon. Subsequently four other bowls of this same remarkable type
and workmanship were learned of, two, the best of the lot, in the
University Museum at Philadelphia; one in the Museum of the American
Indian, New York; and one, somewhat inferior and of reddish stone, in
the possession of Mr. Müller, the trader at Kaltag, on the Yukon (later
in that of Mr. Lynn Smith, marshal at Fairbanks). The localities where
the five remarkable and high-grade specimens have been found range
from the Kenai Peninsula in southwestern Alaska to the lower Yukon.
The Juneau specimen comes from Fish Creek, near Kuik, Cook Inlet (see
Descriptive Booklet Alaska Hist. Mus., Juneau, 1922, pp. 26, 27); that
in the Heye Museum is from the same locality; the one in Philadelphia
was found in the Kenai Peninsula; while that at Kaltag came from an old
Indian site on the Kaiuh slough of the Yukon. Locally, there is much
inclination to regard these specimens as Asiatic, especially Japanese,
and a bronze Japanese Temple medal has been found near that now at
Juneau.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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