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Sara Jacobsen, 19, grew up eating family dinners beneath a stunning Native American robe.
Sara Jacobsen, 19, grew up eating family dinners beneath a stunning Native American robe.
Not that she gave it much thought. Until, that is, her senior year of high school, when she saw a picture of a strikingly similar robe in an art history class.
The teacher told the class about how the robe was used in spiritual ceremonies, Sara Jacobsen said. “I started to wonder why we have it in our house when we’re not Native American.”
She said she asked her dad a few questions about this robe. Her dad, Bruce Jacobsen, called that an understatement.
“I felt like I was on the wrong side of a protest rally, with terms like ‘cultural appropriation’ and ‘sacred ceremonial robes’ and ‘completely inappropriate,’ and terms like that,” he said.
“I got defensive at first, of course,” he said. “I was like, ‘C’mon, Sara! This is more of the political stuff you all say these days.’”
But Sara didn’t back down. “I feel like in our country there are so many things that white people have taken that are not theirs, and I didn’t want to continue that pattern in our family,” she said.
The robe had been a centerpiece in the Jacobsen home. Bruce Jacobsen bought it from a gallery in Pioneer Square in 1986, when he first moved to Seattle. He had wanted to find a piece of Native art to express his appreciation of the region.
The Chilkat robe that hung over the Jacobsen dining room table for years. Credit Courtesy of the Jacobsens
“I just thought it was so beautiful, and it was like nothing I had seen before,” Jacobsen said.
The robe was a Chilkat robe, or blanket, as it’s also known. They are woven by the Tlingit, Haida and Tsimshian peoples of Alaska and British Columbia and are traditionally made from mountain goat wool. The tribal or clan origin of this particular 6-foot-long piece was unclear, but it dated back to around 1900 and was beautifully preserved down to its long fringe.
“It’s a completely symmetric pattern of geometric shapes, and also shapes that come from the culture,” like birds, Jacobsen said. “And then it’s just perfectly made — you can see no seams in it at all.”
Jacobsen hung the robe on his dining room wall.
After more needling from Sara, Jacobsen decided to investigate her claims. He emailed experts at the Burke Museum, which has a huge collection of Native American art and artifacts.
“I got this eloquent email back that said, ‘We’re not gonna tell you what to go do,’ but then they confirmed what Sara said: It was an important ceremonial piece, that it was usually owned by an entire clan, that it would be passed down generation to generation, and that it had a ton of cultural significance to them.“
Jacobsen says he was a bit disappointed to learn that his daughter was right about his beloved Chilkat robe. But he and his wife Gretchen now no longer thought of the robe as theirs. Bruce Jacobsen asked the curators at the Burke Museum for suggestions of institutions that would do the Chilkat robe justice. They told him about the Sealaska Heritage Institute in Juneau.
When Jacobsen emailed, SHI Executive Director Rosita Worl couldn’t believe the offer. “I was stunned. I was shocked. I was in awe. And I was so grateful to the Jacobsen family.”
Worl said the robe has a huge monetary value. But that’s not why it’s precious to local tribes.
“It’s what we call ‘atoow’: a sacred clan object,” she said. “Our beliefs are that it is imbued with the spirit of not only the craft itself, but also of our ancestors. We use [Chilkat robes] in our ceremonies when we are paying respect to our elders. And also it unites us as a people.”
Since the Jacobsens returned the robe to the institute, Worl said, master weavers have been examining it and marveling at the handiwork. Chilkat robes can take a year to make – and hardly anyone still weaves them.
“Our master artist, Delores Churchill, said it was absolutely a spectacular robe. The circles were absolutely perfect. So it does have that importance to us that it could also be used by our younger weavers to study the art form itself.”
Worl said private collectors hardly ever return anything to her organization. The federal Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act requires museums and other institutions that receive federal funding to repatriate significant cultural relics to Native tribes. But no such law exists for private collectors.
Bruce and Gretchen Jacobsen hold the Chilkat robe they donated to the Sealaska Heritage Institute as Joe Zuboff, Deisheetaan, sings and drums and Brian Katzeek (behind robe) dances during the robe’s homecoming ceremony Saturday, August 26, 2017. Credit NOBU KOCH / SEALASKA HERITAGE INSTITUTE
Worl says the institute is lobbying Congress to improve the chances of getting more artifacts repatriated. “We are working on a better tax credit system that would benefit collectors so that they could be compensated,” she said.
Worl hopes stories like this will encourage people to look differently at the Native art and artifacts they possess.
The Sealaska Heritage Institute welcomed home the Chilkat robe in a two-hour ceremony over the weekend. Bruce and Gretchen Jacobsen traveled to Juneau to celebrate the robe’s homecoming.
nancy wheeler: *loses her best friend when she’s murdered by a bloodthirsty monster and feels immense guilt about it because she truly believes it’s her fault*
nancy wheeler: *reacts somewhat emotionally because she can’t even tell her best friend’s parents what happened and they’re SELLING THEIR HOUSE to try to find their daughter because of their false hope*
nancy wheeler: *has a hard time feeling deeply connected with her loving boyfriend, not because of any fault of his, but because she’s SIXTEEN, and she’s dealing with A Lot Of Shit*
nancy wheeler: *naturally gravitates towards Jonathan who understands a similar sort of loss and stood by her side while they were trying to hunt the monster that took her best friend (and his brother)*
nancy wheeler: *handles her emotion with anger and focus on a cause instead of dealing with it head on because she is a T E E N A G E R and would rather burn Hawkins Lab to the ground by exposing them to the world than work through her complicated loss*
everyone on the internet: omg nancy has no depth she’s such a BITCH she’s just toying with the boys emotion and playing them!
#female character showing complicated and unpretty emotions? what a bitch # a woman not being perfectly demure and subsuming her feelings for the sake of her man and his comfort? garbage # i know steve is everyone’s precious cinnamon roll now #but maybe step the fuck off a traumatized teenager for not handling her grief in a perfectly pretty uncomplicated way #and for liking someone that she has more in common with??? (x)
It wasn’t typical for NFL players to stand for the national anthem until 2009—before then, it was customary for players to stay in the locker room as the anthem played. A 2015 congressional report revealed that the Department of Defense had paid $5.4 million to NFL teams between 2011 and 2014 to stage on-field patriotic ceremonies; the National Guard shelled out $6.7 million for similar displays between 2013 and 2015.
Hillary Clinton responds to the question, “Have you ever won a drinking competition?” While Hillary says here that she considers it to have been a tie, urban folklore about the event has often claimed that she, in fact, beat McCain. The match took place at an Estonian bar during a 2004 visit to the country, and the bar’s owner did not hesitate to confirm, when asked, that, “Hillary won. She stayed correct after four shots.”
Cassini is the first spacecraft that was destroyed not from malfunction, or as a necessary end result of its mission… but out of love.
The probe was running out of propulsion fuel, but there’s no reason it couldn’t have been pushed into a stable orbit from where it could collect data and send back pictures for a long while yet.
Except it had detected that one of Saturn’s moons held liquid water and organic compounds: a world that might support life. A world that is, at the least, dreaming of life.
There is no orbit stable enough to be certain that the probe, carrying radioactive batteries and Earth’s bacteria, would never have come into contact with Enceladus. A delicate island of alien life could have been snuffed out or overrun. The sheep could have eaten the rose.
So instead - for the love of this fragile possibility, this potential that might yet never be realized - Cassini was brought into a final, intimate tango with Saturn.
But of course, all space probes are built for the sake of awe, which is nearly love. Science is rational, but scientists are driven to understand the universe just as the religious strive to know the face of God.
The Cassini probe was a 4 billion dollar machine for understanding Saturn. And yesterday, two decades after it launched from our planet, it was destroyed while sending us information about Saturn it never could have gathered from a distant, stable orbit: advancing its purpose, even knowing that it would be consumed.
This in no way undercuts the wonder of Cassini, but it is not the first spacecraft to be destroyed out of necessity. Galileo, the Jupiter orbiter was also sent into Jupiter’s atmosphere in 2003 to avoid contamination of Jupiter’s moons (Galileo provided evidence that Europa, Ganymede, and Callisto all have liquid salt water underneath visible surfaces).
Galileo and Cassini also share name origins: their namesakes discovered their planets’ major moons.
The Atlantic’s piece on how NASA decides to kill a spacecraft is worth a quick read and the end is quiet poetic and emotional.
That sequence occurs in the grim no-man’s-land between English and German battlefield trenches. Though Diana has been told she can’t cross it and must play by man’s rules, she takes it upon herself to save women and children threatened by the Germans. It’s a very powerful moment. We have a character committing to her true self, doing what she believes needs to be done.
We had a lot of rain this winter, more than what we’re used to. It brought water back to our waterfalls and flowers back to our hills. Southern California is covered in wildflowers. (taniainnature)
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