Digital Project: Penn State Libraries Launches Digital Project Highlighting 1899 Alaska Expedition Materials

From PSU Libraries:

A new digital project, “Harriman Recollected: New Views of an 1899 Expedition to Alaska,” makes accessible a handwritten diary and Indigenous artworks housed at Penn State’s Eberly Family Special Collections Library. The project presents research that sheds new light on the materials and their provenance and offers innovative pathways for thinking about, and teaching with, primary and historical sources and art within the larger framework of ethical collecting and stewardship within archives, libraries and museums.

As guiding principles, the project aims to emphasize Indigenous territorial ownership, refuse harmful terminology, and question assumptions of consent regarding the photographs taken during the expedition.

In 1989, the Special Collections library at Penn State University Libraries received a generous donation from an alum: a diary, two photograph albums and seven Indigenous artworks acquired by the donor’s great-uncle George Nelson, the chaplain on board the Harriman Alaska Expedition of 1899. The expedition included such field-defining scientists as the preservationist John Muir and George Bird Grinnell, organizer of the first Audubon Society. Harriman, Nelson and their almost 50 companions embarked from Seattle, Washington on May 31, 1899, for the two-month cruise along the southeastern coast of Alaska and across the Bering Strait to Siberia. On this route, they traveled over the lands and waters of the Tsimshian, Tlingit, dAXunhyuu or Eyak, Alutiiq and Sugpiaq, Dena’ina, Unangax̂, Inupiaq, and Siberian Yupik.

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