Collection Practices of the Time:

The objects in Oberlin’s Arctic Collection were first collected from indigenous communities in Alaska on various expeditions between 1869 to 1887. Collectors were often trained naturalists, focusing on animal and plant species of Alaska, and hired by museum curators with the secondary goal of preserving indigenous practices. These native communities were often viewed as ‘pure’ but dying out, and these curators intended to preserve the legacy and novelty of these cultures through material objects. This attitude was known as ‘salvage anthropology’.

On the whole, the expeditions these men led treated indigenous culture (and indigenous objects) the same way as they treated natural specimens - as if they were representations of a singular bounded (and endangered) ‘species’, not a living legacy of dynamic societies. Some collectors directly contradicted indigenous practices in favor of adding to their own collections, even to the point of robbing indigenous graves to collect bones and funerary objects. These practices influenced the types of objects that were collected, the lens through which they were viewed, and the subsequent treatment of those objects. On a base level, the objects were considered representations of natural history, not cultural history, and were collected in a historical moment that rarely upheld indigenous agency.