New from Peabody Museum Press

Souvenirs of the Fur Trade: Northwest Coast Indian Art and Artifacts
Collected by American Mariners, 1788-1844

Mary Malloy

American mariners made more than 175 voyages to the Northwest Coast during
the half-century after the ships Columbia and Washington pioneered the
route from Boston in 1787. Although obtaining sea otter pelts for the China
trade was the original purpose of the voyages, the art and culture of
Northwest Coast Indians so intrigued and fascinated American sailors that
the collecting of ethnographic artifacts became an important secondary
trade. The Indians traded masks, hats, paddles, pipes, fishhooks, spoons,
clothing, and canoe models from their canoes to the decks of Yankee vessels.

In this act of exchange, the artifacts moved from one world to
another-first to shipboard, and later to the "cabinets of curiosities" of
learned societies in Massachusetts, where many of them found homes. The
objects were the first examples of Northwest Coast Indian material culture
to enter American museums, and they influenced perceptions of Northwest
Coast Indian people and their complex cultures.

By carefully researching the records of ten institutions and the shipboard
journals of more than a dozen mariners, Mary Malloy has brought details
about these early collections together for the first time. From utilitarian
objects to artistic masterpieces, these souvenirs tell a story of commerce
and cultural exchange that reached across the continent during the period
when Americans were first beginning to look westward.

Publication date: December 2000
Paperback: 0-87365-833-7, $35.00
188 pp., 39 figs., 13 pls., bibliography, index, ISBN 0-87365-833-7.

Available from Amazon.com or from the Publications Department, Peabody
Museum, 11 Divinity Ave., Cambridge, MA  02138. Phone: 617-496-9922. Fax:
617-495-7535. E-mail: [log in to unmask] Web site:
www.peabody.harvard.edu/publications/
default.htm.

Donna M. Dickerson

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