Lieutenant George Thornton Emmons, U.S.N., was station in Alaska
during the 1880s and 1890s, a time when the Navy was largely
responsible for law and stability in the Territory. His duties
brought him into close contact with the Tlingit Indians, whose
respect he won and from whom he gained an understanding of and
respect for their culture. He became a friend of many Tlingit
leaders, visited their homes, traveled in their canoes when on
leave, purchased native artifacts, and recorded native traditions.
In addition to an interest in native manufacturing and in the more
spectacular aspects of native life - such as bear hunting, Chilkat
blankets, feuds, and the potlatch - Emmons showed the
ethnographer's devotion to recording all aspects of the culture
together with the Tlingit terms, and came to understand Tlingit
beliefs and values better than did any of his nonnative
contemporaries. He was widely recognized for his extensive
collections of Tlingit artifacts and art, and for the detailed
notes that accompanied them. At the request of Morris K. Jesup,
president of the American Museum of Natural History (which had
purchased Emmons's first two Tlingit collections), and on the
recommendation of Franz Boas, Emmons began to organize his notes
and prepare a manuscript on the Tlingit. During his retirement, he
published several articles and monographs and continued to study
and work on his comprehensive book. But when he died in 1945, the
book was still unfinished, and he left several drafts in the museum
and also in the provincial archives of British Columbia in
Victoria, where he had been writing during the last decades of his
life. Frederica de Laguna, eminent ethnologist and archaeologist
with long personal experience with the Tlingit, was asked by the
museum to edit The Tlingit Indians for publication. Over the past
thirty years she has worked to organize Emmons's materials,
scrupulously following his plan of including extracts from the
earliest historical sources. She also has made significant
additions from contemporary or more recent authors, and from works
unknown ton Emmons or unavailable to him, and has given the
ethnography greater historical depth by presenting this information
in chronological order. She has also added relevant commentary of
her own based on her encyclopedic information about past and
present Tlingit culture. With the help of Jeff Leer of the Alaskan
Native Language Center, an expert on Tlingit, she has provided
modern phonetic transcriptions of Tlingit words whenever Emmons has
given native terms in his own idiosyncratic and inconsistent
versions of Tlingit. This major contribution to the ethnography of
the Northwest Coast also includes a meticulously researched
biography of Lieutenant Emmons by Jean Low, an extensive
bibliography, and thirty-seven tables in which de Laguna draws
together and tightens Emmons's materials on topics such as census
data, names of clans and houses, species of plants and their uses,
native calendars, and names of gambling sticks. Illustrations
include numerous photographs and sketches made and annotated by
Emmons. This volume will be invaluable to anthropologists,
historians, and the general public - including the Tlingit Indians
themselves, to whom it is dedicated. Frederica de Laguna ,
professor emeritus of anthropology at Bryn Mawr College, is the
author of the three-volume Under Mount Saint Elias (on the Tlingit
of Yakutat) and numerous other works on Alaska archaeology and
ethnography.
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