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Chest
British Columbia, Queen Charlotte Islands; Haida (att.)
Collected by William A. Setchell from the Tlingit; Juneau, Alaska, 1899; donated 1922.
2–10847
The native peoples of the Northwest Coast are renowned for their storage boxes. Using a technique called “kerfing,” these boxes are constructed from a single cedar plank that is notched in three places, then steamed and bent, with the joining sides pegged or sewn. Two separate pieces form the bottom and top lid (missing in this piece). Boxes are typically painted in the characteristic regional decorative style of a tapering black “formline,” secondary areas of red, and tertiary sections of blue-green. Large chests might be used to store dance masks, rattles, and other ceremonial regalia. Because chests such as this were commonly traded to distant tribes the designs may have been intentionally ambiguous, avoiding the representation of specific ancestral crests.
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