ABSTRACT
This chapter describes efforts begun in 1994 to bring Yup'ik elders in direct contact with museum collections gathered from their region 100 years ago to simultaneously preserve their knowledge and make it available to scholars and Yup'ik community members. The museum artifacts that provided our focus were the 7,000 objects collected by Johan Adrian Jacobsen from Alaska in 1882–3. Housed in Berlin's Museum für Völkerkunde (now the Etnologisches Museum), they constitute the largest unpublished collection of Yup'ik artefacts anywhere in the world, including detailed ethnographic and linguistic information. Bringing information about a major collection home to Alaska is an act of ‘visual repatriation’ that we hope will illuminate the world view of its creators. Yup'ik elders working side by side with anthropologists and museum professionals can help us better understand the artefacts Jacobsen collected from their area. These are first steps in the two-way process of Yup'ik people owning their past and museum curators realizing the full value of the contents of their attics.
