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\u201cOur Story in Many Voices: The Alaska State Museum Catalog and Guide\u201d by Charles Wohlforth, with design by Sarah Asper-Smith <\/p>\n\u201cOur Story in Many Voices: The Alaska State Museum Catalog and Guide\u201d by Charles Wohlforth, with design by Sarah Asper-Smith <\/p>\n
\u201cOur Story in Many Voices: The Alaska State Museum Catalog and Guide\u201d<\/p>\n
By Charles Wohlforth, with design by Sarah Asper-Smith; University of Alaska Press, 2025; 155 pages; $29.95.<\/p>\n
Q: When is a museum catalog not a museum catalog? <\/p>\n
A: When it is so much more than that, as is the case with this highly readable, informative and provocative book by Charles Wohlforth, a longtime Alaskan and accomplished writer who was intimately involved in the state museum\u2019s new exhibits.<\/p>\n
In 2016, the Alaska State Museum reopened in Juneau in the Father Andrew P. Kashevaroff Building, sharing space with the state library and archives. The new space and design offered the opportunity for new exhibits and present-day interpretations of Alaska\u2019s history. <\/p>\n
Wohlforth and illustrator Sarah Asper-Smith were independently funded to present the process and updating and were not beholden to the museum, its staff or the book\u2019s publisher \u2014 although they did consult with staff and others and quote liberally from the \u201cmany voices\u201d who were involved.<\/p>\n
The \u201cmany voices\u201d is in fact key to the book and extends well beyond the living to include Indigenous and historical perspectives from earliest times to the present. As Wohlforth writes in his introduction, he and Asper-Smith have attempted to guide readers, especially Alaskans, \u201cinto a deepening Alaska story in this current moment of change, as familiar characters and incidents reorient themselves in new dimensions.\u201d<\/p>\n
The result is a personal narrative in which the author inserts his own experience and point of view while telling a fact-based and peer-reviewed account of Alaska\u2019s history and cultures. A great deal of emphasis is placed on the ongoing challenge to any museum of what to exhibit, in what context, to tell the stories of place and people \u2014 and to encourage visitors to think deeply and find their own meanings.<\/p>\n
The reconfigured museum, aside from the small earth sciences section, the changing exhibits galleries and a kids\u2019 discovery room, is sectioned into three areas \u2014 Native Alaska (time immemorial to the present), Russian Alaska (1741-1867) and American Alaska (1867-the present). <\/p>\n
The book, after an orienting section about Alaska\u2019s geography, natural history and human ecology, tells Alaska\u2019s story in three sections that differ somewhat from the museum\u2019s organization. These are Native Alaska, Conquest and Resistance, and American Colony. These three, together, acknowledge the complexities of our history. The singular story of the state\u2019s settlement and development, with its pioneering optimism, is here replaced by a more complicated one, one that is still unfolding. <\/p>\n
Much discussion is given by Wohlforth to how the \u201cNative story\u201d has changed over the years and will continue to develop. The older museum had treated Native objects (and the lives they belong to) largely as from the past while the new exhibits, with the involvement of many people from within the cultures, emphasizes the continuation of traditions. <\/p>\n
Wohlforth takes a critical look at the economic and cultural influence of both the Russian years and the later American colonization and assimilation policies. Recent art \u2014 like Nicholas Galanin\u2019s \u201cWhat Have We Become?\u201d sculpture of a human head as a book of pages \u2014 is both integrated into exhibitry and highlighted by Wohlforth. The Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act is placed in historical context and examined in the context of rising tribal sovereignty. <\/p>\n
The extensive section titled \u201cVoicing Alaska\u2019s Story\u201d is full of insider details and surprises. We learn that the architectural firm had contracted with an exhibit design company for the exhibits, the usual practice, but museum staff were unhappy with the initial designs. They requested permission to take on the job themselves, even under the pressure of deadlines, and were trusted to do so. The building design itself was controversial, with the ideas that the architects brought to it being replaced, after many community meetings and iterations, with \u201cwhat people wanted and needed.\u201d<\/p>\n
As part of the mitigation for the demolishment of the cherished older museum \u2014 a project, like others around the state, funded to celebrate the centennial of Alaska\u2019s transfer from Russia \u2014 a book of text and photos was commissioned to \u201cshare what became of those big ideas of 1967.\u201d (This reviewer wrote the section about projects on the Kenai and in Kodiak.) According to Wohlforth, the completed book, \u201cThe View from the Future\u20142017\u201d was \u201cessentially disavowed\u201d by the director of the Division of Libraries, Archives and Museums at the time and disappeared, along with its digital version. The director considered the Alaska \u201cpurchase\u201d a shameful taking of Native lands and thus unworthy of acknowledgment. <\/p>\n
One of the many people who appear in these pages is Bob Banghart, whose tenure with the museum began in 1974, when he installed a spruce tree with taxidermied eagles in the old museum\u2019s spiral staircase. Forty years later Barnhart was tasked with dismantling the tree. Because he\u2019d used formaldehyde and asbestos in assembling it, it was designated as hazardous material. Specialists in protective suits were brought in to encapsulate and then dispose of it. The new museum includes a new tree, one that had to be lowered by a crane through the unfinished roof.<\/p>\n
The book\u2019s layout is truly beautiful, with examples from the museum\u2019s collection displayed on every page. In the Native section, for example, the text emphasizes technologies used by the various cultures, and the photos show examples. Here readers can contemplate an inflation valve for a float, a wrist guard for bow hunting, a 5,000-year-old spruce root basket that had been preserved in wet mud, a birchbark canoe, a three-cockpit kayak for sea otter hunting during the Russian period, snow goggles, and a modern fiddle used in the art of Athabascan fiddling. The theme here is of innovation, adaptation and resilience.<\/p>\n
\u201cOur Story in Many Voices,\u201d in its latter pages, includes a section of sources and suggestions for further reading as well as a more traditional catalog of objects. This is a book that deserves attention from anyone interested in Alaska history and cultures, with or without the opportunity to visit the State Museum.<\/p>\n
[Book review: New book delivers the story of Elizabeth Peratrovich\u2019s valiant life to another generation<\/a>]<\/p>\n