At the Grand Entrance to Celebration each June, dancers from around Southeast Alaska entered Centennial Hall, wearing button blankets with hand-beaded clan crests, hats woven from strips of cedar, and carved formline headpieces depicting clan emblems.
Celebration only lasts a few days, but in that time, over 5,000 Lingít, Haida and Tsimshian people bring cherished regalia, often handmade by loved ones or renowned artists, to Juneau.
After the drumbeats die down at the end of the week, many attendees start working on making or collecting regalia for next Celebration. But some of the items they bring get left behind. When that happens, it ends up in Sealaska Heritage Institute’s basement, where archivists have been carefully storing and cataloging the lost and found from Celebration over the years.
“There’s objects here, going back as far as, I think, 2006 and we want them to go home to their families,” said Emily Galgano, the archives and collections director at Sealaska Heritage Institute. Her team has been working to catalog the 150 or so lost items of Celebrations gone by.
Sometimes, in the chaos of the dancing, singing, and story times, valuable things are dropped or left in a corner. In the days and months after the event, a few people reach out to claim their hats and robes.
“Then after a while, those requests start to trickle out, and people aren’t asking anymore, and that’s when it comes down to archives,” Galgano said. “And here we keep them in museum quality conditions. They’re in our vault where it’s temperature and humidity controlled, and we keep them in a sterile environment, and we just try to make sure we’re taking care of them.”
Marjorie Barker Edá Shawaat Tlakwadzee has been helping catalog the lost items. She’s a weaver, too, and she knows how much work goes into making some of these items.
“I’m sure a lot of these regalia was made by family members, you know, aunties or mothers or sisters,” she said. “Like, I mean, when I make regalia, I’m thinking of my nieces and nephews.”
Barker said she was shocked at first by how much stuff there was in the lost and found, but then she saw all the kids’ sized regalia. She thought of the way those nieces and nephews play around at gatherings and how they aren’t always the most aware of where their stuff is.
But the adult items make her think that the person it belongs to may be very worried about their regalia.
“I’d be devastated if I lost my robe,” she said. “So I just, it’s just kind of a weird feeling, just like, it’s like, you really want it to go back to who it belonged to.”
Galgano’s team will post a call out on social media to anyone who has lost a piece of regalia at Celebrations in the last 18 years. They ask for a description and photos of the item to prove ownership.
And if that item is in the basement, Galgano said, they’ll send it home, so that someone can dance in it again.
