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Anchorage history and culture
Museums and Heritage Center offer insight into Native life
By Steve Edwards / Anchorage Daily News
From the moment visitors arrive in Anchorage, they are surrounded by Alaska's cultural heritage. It doesn't require a visit to one of the community's excellent museums to get a taste.
Ted Stevens Anchorage International Airport is adorned with hundreds of pieces of traditional and contemporary artwork. The pieces represent the five major indigenous cultures in the state.
The airport is joined by the Alaska Native Medical Center and the Heritage Library Museum in the Wells Fargo Bank building as unusual places to find historical artifacts and artwork.
And all three venues are free.
The Heritage museum, 301 W. Northern Lights Blvd., houses thousands of artifacts -- some more than 2,000 years old. It also has an extensive art collection, including works by famous Alaska artists Sydney Laurence, Fred Machetanz and Rusty Heurlin. It's one of the largest privately owned public displays of Alaska's history and Native cultures in the world.
"We've got an awful lot of history represented right here," curator Gail Hollinger said.
The museum represents all Alaska Native cultures, from the Tlingit of Southeast Alaska to the Athabaskan of Southcentral and the Yup'ik of the Arctic area.
"We want to show all the cultures," Hollinger said. "Who the people were; what they had; what they did with what they had."
A stroll through the museum is truly a walk through history.
Most of the items are displayed in large, glass-topped cases. The cases are grouped according to culture, and they feature plaques explaining the culture and the items displayed.
The collection includes a wide range of artifacts including household utensils, hunting weapons and articles of clothing. There is a large basket collection that allows visitors to compare the various weaving techniques and materials used throughout Alaska.
"You can learn so much just looking at the baskets," Hollinger said. "Some of the baskets have little pieces of bird leg skin on them for adornment. You have Aleut grass baskets and Eskimo grass baskets. They are completely different -- a different style, even a different use.
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