Louis Shotridge and the Penn Museum

Penn Museum’s first and only indigenous curator was Stuwukáa, also known as Louis Shotridge, a talented and ambitious Tlingit native of Southeast Alaska. Employed for two decades to make collections and conduct ethnographic fieldwork among his Tlingit clansmen in Alaska, Shotridge organized four collecting expeditions between 1913 and 1932 and shipped hundreds of objects back to the Museum in Philadelphia. At the time, his efforts safeguarded Tlingit art and culture from a repressive American government striving to eradicate American Indian and Alaskan native practices in favor of US citizenship. Today, a century later, Louis Shotridge’s world-renowned collections of extraordinary Tlingit art, photographs, letters, ethnographic field notes, and published articles continue to tell the stories of the great Tlingit families and the meanings of Tlingit art from the Tlingit point of view.