Treasures from Native California

The Legacy of Russian Exploration

Travis Hudson, Craig D Bates, Thomas Blackburn, John R Johnson, Thomas Blackburn, John R Johnson

• Verlag: Routledge
• Jahr: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781315416359
• Auflage: 1
• Thema: Social Sciences
• Thema: Archaeology

The brief Russian presence in California yielded some of the earliest ethnography of Native Californians and some of the best collections of their material culture. Unstudied by western scholars because of their being housed in Russian museums, they are presented here for the first time in an English language volume. Descriptions of early nineteenth-century travelers such as von Wrangel and Voznesenskii are followed by a catalog of objects ranging from hunting weapons to household objects to ritual dress to musical instruments, games, and gift objects. This catalog of objects includes over 150 images, many in full color. An essential volume for those interested in the ethnology, archaeology, art, and cultures of Native Californians.

Chapter 1
Introduction

The Kunstkamera’s California Collection

For Spain’s Minister to Russia, the Conde de Lacey, the year 1772 was filled with anxiety. Rumors were circulating in St. Petersburg of further Russian expansion into the North Pacific, rumors similar to those which only three years before had prompted the beginnings of a chain of missions and presidios along the Alta California coast to protect that area from Russian expansion (Watson 1934:19–22). Suspicions of continued Russian interest in the North Pacific found alarming support in the discovery of a printed Russian map. For de Lacey, the situation called for a notification of Madrid at once in the hope that there might still be enough time for Spain to extend and reestablish her claims to the coast above Monterey, which was also vaguely considered to be Alta California. Orders went out from the Spanish court to outfit an expedition to the North Pacific to investigate Russian activities and to reaffirm Madrid’s claim. Through the viceroy of New Spain, the task was assigned to Juan Josef Perez Hernandez, whose vessel Santiago sailed into the waters off what is now western Canada two years later (Wagner 1937:172–173); however, the voyage was already too late.

The riches to be gained from the fur trade had already come to the attention of St. Petersburg, and as a consequence, the Russians were sailing the waters of the North Pacific in search of sea otters and fur seals. The hunters, called promyshlenniks, were originally sent out by merchants and investors representing a number of trading companies, but by 1799 the number of parties involved had been reduced to one—the Russian-American Company. Its presence in the North Pacific created even more difficulties for Spanish claims through the establishment of permanent settlements in the land of “Russian America” (Zagumlennyi 1964).

a.

Figure 1.1. Fort Ross as depicted by two early visitors: (a) Auguste Duhaut-Cilly, 1828;

Russian fur trading companies differed somewhat from their British and American counterparts; they not only traded directly with the natives, they also conscripted them. Aleut and Kodiak Islanders, for example, became serfs, with their compulsory labor paid in clothing, tobacco, and food (Gibson 1978:363). This system resulted in a number of colonies becoming permanent outposts and settlements from which the Russians could then operate. Moreover, because excessive hunting eventually created a need to scour new regions for “soft gold,” the Russian presence and influence in the area quickly spread (Gibson 1978:359; Wagner 1937:156–157), and—to the detriment of Spanish interests—the general direction that expansion took was southward along the coast. Madrid countered with its own colonial expansion, which moved northward along the coast of Alta California and established a series of missions and presidios. It was now only a matter of time before a Russian sailor or hunter would encounter a Spanish soldier or priest somewhere north of San Francisco along the rugged California coast.

Although the initial contact between Russians and Spaniards in California took place in San Francisco during the 1806 visit of Nikolai Rezanov, actual Russian settlement occurred some 50 miles further north, at a place the Spanish called Bodega Bay and that the Russians called Port Rumiantsev. Here, a shallow bay afforded Russian vessels from as far away as Kamchatka and Alaska a place to unload their cargo and pick up furs and other produce bound for the north. By 1812, Count Rezanov’s 1806 dream of a Russian settlement had become a reality (Figure 1.1). The new colony would soon include not only Port Rumiantsev, but also a stockade (Fort Ross) and some intervening farms as well, all of which were expected to provide a base of operations for both the sea mammal hunters that were exploiting California’s soft gold and for the agricultural activities whose products could be exported to Russian colonies in the far north (Essig 1933:151). The Russians hoped that the malnutrition, scurvy, and other hardships that afflicted Sitka, Kodiak, and the other northern settlements would be alleviated by importing fresh fruits and vegetables from California to grace their tables; the profits to be made from furs were a welcome bonus (Petrov 1977; Rokitiansky 1977).

Fort Ross became a way station, and among its many visitors were a few military men and scientists who took a keen interest in the natural history and ethnography of the region that the Russians were to call “New Albion,” and of adjacent portions of Alta California.¹ Many ethnographic objects were taken back to Russia (and other European countries) by these men as curios, collectibles, and souvenirs, and these items often ended up in the various “cabinets of curiosities” and “chambers of rarities” that were so popular at the time (Bates 1983; Blackburn and Hudson 1991; Hudson 1984). At first these small, private “museums” merely represented the natural history and “artificial” interests of their princely or gentleman-scholar owners; however, in time they were to be accessioned into much larger, public-oriented collections which constituted the nucleus for many of Europe’s finest ethnographic museums. The cabinet of Tsar Peter the Great, for example, later formed the basis for St. Petersburg’s Kunstkamera Museum, known today as the Museum of Anthropology and Ethnography and named after Peter the Great (Anonymous 1970).

b.

(b) Il’ia Voznesenskii, 1841. Courtesy of Ft. Ross State Historic Park.

The Kunstkamera has the distinction of being Russia’s first scientific institution. Begun in 1718 on the banks of the Neva, the building was completed two decades later and became the museum for the Imperial Academy of Sciences. The museum, which is now nearly 300 years old, is still operating, and is presently administered by the St. Petersburg Division of the Russian Academy of Sciences. The Kunstkamera is not only Russia’s oldest scientific institution, it has the additional distinction of housing the largest collection of pre-1850 California ethnographic materials to be found anywhere in the world.

Most Californians—and indeed, most Americans—would probably be astonished to learn that such a large collection was housed in Russia rather than in a prominent American institution such as the Smithsonian, the Museum of the American Indian, or the Autry Museum. How, they might wonder, could it have ever gotten there? The answer is simple. Before the Smithsonian Institution was established in 1846, such collections were taken to museums in various European cities, and no such museum was as involved with or as interested in California as the Kunstkamera. It became the repository for the many minor collections from Russian America that were assembled by navigators, explorers, and naturalists; it also came to house the incredible collection acquired by Il’ia Voznesenskii in 1840 and 1841. Voznesenskii, whose natural history and ethnographic specimens numbered in the thousands, was active during the final months of Russian involvement with California (Bates 1983) and just before the 1849 Gold Rush was to destroy many aspects of traditional California Indian culture.

Despite the uniqueness of the Kunstkamera collections—particularly those portions assembled by Voznesenskii—they were fated to languish for decades in almost total obscurity. There were many reasons for this neglect, although problems of communication stemming from geographical distance, language differences, and national politics were particularly critical. Russian scholars were faced with such difficulties as the absence of comparative collections, a lack of training in California ethnography and archaeology, and limited access to both published and unpublished data, while American scholars were generally unaware of the scope of the Russian collections and had no idea as to who might be consulted for specific information.

The importance of the Kunstkamera collections, of course, is a result of the fact that they are unique, and that they represent a period of California Indian life that is otherwise known only from skimpy historical descriptions and from limited archaeological collections. Rapid changes in material culture took place after the arrival of Europeans in California, as newly introduced tools, materials, processes, and ideas displaced traditional ones. Within the span of eight decades—from Spanish settlement in 1769 until territorial annexation under the Americans—tribe after tribe succumbed to foreign influences, until in many places traditional ways of life existed only in memory.

The loss of many individuals through murder, warfare, and disease (Cook 1943) also contributed to the diminished populations of native peoples, and the near annihilation of many groups. When these changes occurred, any opportunity for the few fledgling American museums, then extant in the east, to acquire examples of traditional material culture items was difficult at best, and in some cases impossible. A few pre-1850 objects, of course, did make it into American collections—such as the 1841 materials acquired by the Wilkes expedition (Viola and Margolis 1985), which were eventually deposited with the Smithsonian (and some of which were later exchanged with other museums)—but for the most part such objects were taken to Europe.²

Although the single largest collection of early California items is to be found in the Kunstkamera, other much smaller collections have been found in the most surprising places, probably as a result of various types of transactions: objects were given as presents, sold to museums and dealers, sold again at auction, passed on to relatives, and so on (Blackburn and Hudson 1991; Gunther 1972:ix). In Moscow, for example, the university’s Museum of Anthropology has a small collection of 11 undocumented pieces from California. Similar California pieces are turning up in Germany because of their past association with Russified or Baltic Germans. In Frankfurt, for instance, the Museum für Völkerkunde houses eight pieces which were collected by Ferdinand von Wrangell, while the Staatliches Museum für Völkerkunde in Munich has seven California pieces, some of which were acquired by Georg von Langsdorff. The Staatliches Museum für Naturkunde und Vorgeschichte in Oldenburg houses a feather belt collected by Ivan Kuprianov. Helsinki’s Suomen Kansallismuseo has 67 objects from California that were collected by Arvid Adolf Etholen and Uno Cygnaeus. A feather headdress and decorated bone ear ornament collected by Ferdinanad Deppe in San Jose in 1837 is present in the Christy collection at the British Museum’s Museum of Mankind; they were obtained in an exchange with the Berlin Museum. Undocumented—or more correctly, unidentified—early California pieces are probably to be found in other European museums as well, like the recently discovered basket (SVZ 11788a) in Zurich which stylistically resembles others from Russian California, or the two similar baskets at the Estonian History Museum in Tallinn.

To small European museums, such unidentified pieces are often of little importance, and their lack of provenance tends to foster a lack of appreciation. Moreover, such objects, which were collected “just yesterday” (that is, in the eighteenth or early nineteenth century), might seem to local museum personnel to lack the glamorous antiquity of paleolithic tools or the beauty of ancient Egyptian or Greek sculptures and ceramics (Gunther 1972:ix). As a consequence, most of the interest in these smaller collections has tended to come from American scholars. Our own interest in the collections from Russian California began as a result of correspondence with our Russian counterparts in the Kunstkamera (or as it is actually known today, the Museum of Anthropology and Ethnography or MAE). Additional information, although unfortunately very limited in scope, was obtained from papers by such Russian scholars as Efimov and Tokarev (1959), Liapunova (1967), Kojean (1979), and Okladnikova (1981). None of these sources, however, was a satisfactory substitute for an examination of the actual specimens; fortunately, Hudson was given the opportunity to study the entire collection in person in March 1983.

After being selected to take part in a scientific exchange program between the National Academy of Sciences of the United States and the Academy of Sciences of the USSR, Hudson was able to devote three weeks to studying the California collections in St. Petersburg. A portion of that time was devoted to working with the curator assigned to the collections, Elena Okladnikova, who has since published additional descriptive information on these objects (Okladnikova 1984). The scientific exchange program also allowed Hudson to briefly see the collections at Moscow State University’s Museum of Anthropology.

Additional support provided by a grant from the Wenner-Gren Foundation enabled Hudson to visit 32 other museums in 14 countries while he was in Europe, including Finnish and German institutions...