"For Future Generations": Tlingit, Haida and American Art in Alaska's New Deal Totem Parks

FAIN: FT-229453-15

Emily Lehua Moore
Colorado State University (Fort Collins, CO 80521-2807)

Summer research and writing on Art History and Criticism and Native American Studies.

From 1938 to 1942, as part of a work relief program for Native Americans during the Depression, the U.S. government employed Tlingit and Haida men to repair or replicate more than one hundred nineteenth-century totem poles in Southeast Alaska and to re-erect these poles in "totem parks" for tourists. My book manuscript examines the complex cross-cultural negotiations involved in this New Deal program, considering Tlingit and Haida reasons for participating in this project as well as non-Native reasons for patronizing Native American art in the 1930s and 1940s. As the first book-length study of one of the largest acts of federal patronage for Native American art in the twentieth century, the manuscript offers a rich case study for American humanities scholars, examining the U.S.'s mercurial interest in the nation's Native heritage and Native American agency in adapting a federal program to their needs. An NEH Summer Stipend would enable me to complete this manuscript.

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