This article appeared in the March/April issue ofOn the Copper River in south-central Alaska, a celebrated chief named Łtaxda’x once owned a dish hewn from the antler of a giant moose. When Łtaxda’x died, four brothers fought over this ceremonial platter of the Raven clan. According to some tellings of the ancient story, one brother who lost gathered the people who sided with him and led them away from their ancestral home into the unknown.
Crowell knows the Indigenous Raven stories nearly as well as the people raised on them. He is also deeply familiar with Yakutat Bay on the Gulf of Alaska, where the Tlingit people claim to have been guided by the spirit of Mount St. Elias, the mountain that first appeared as a rabbit. As an archaeologist, Crowell has found copper artifacts on the land the Tlingit still occupy, and has seen trace metal analyses that prove the alloy originated a couple of hundred miles away on the Copper River.
He isn’t alone in this mission. “It’s very powerful for Native peoples’ point of view to be respected, to see that our knowledge is just as valid as Western science,” says Judith Ramos, a member of the Yakutat Tlingit clan and an anthropologist at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. She has worked alongside Crowell as a co-investigator on the Yakutat Bay project. “Indigenous knowledge can enrich scientific knowledge. They can be mutually enriching.
Over five years in the early 1950s, de Laguna lived with the Tlingit and collected their stories, many of which had never been written down. Her research led to a 1,400-page English-language monograph published by the Smithsonian Institution, still used as a standard reference by the tribe. De Laguna is also the one who, guided by oral traditions, led the first excavation of Knight Island and found traces of Tlákw.aan.
Crowell arrived in Alaska by way of his work in Labrador. The archaeologist who had brought him to the Arctic as an undergraduate, William Fitzhugh, was running the Smithsonian Arctic Studies Center, and wanted to open an Alaska field office. Crowell’s combination of interests, experiences and a Ph.D. made him the ideal candidate.
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