Welcome to the Collection!

Usually twice a year a volunteer group known as the Acquisitions Committee meets to decide which objects should be incorporated into the Kodiak Historical Society’s permanent collection. It’s a fun group of long time and lifelong Kodiak residents who are familiar with our community’s history and passionate about its preservation. 

Acquisitions Committee members, lifelong Kodiak residents,
and sisters Myrtle Olsen and Martha Randolph pose in front of the
objects recently added into the permanent collection.

This week we had a meeting and decided to welcome 18 objects into the museum’s collection. These newest additions to the collection are like a grab bag of Kodiak history. They range from the very new, like a wooden salmon roe box from Larsen Bay’s Icicle Seafoods cannery, to older objects, like the 1840 mint Russian coin that was likely in circulation in Kodiak during the Russian era.  They represent commerce, like the Bank of Kodiak money barrel and Kraft’s clipboard, and entertainment, such as the Tony’s Place bar glass from the 1940s. And, just in time for the upcoming Crab Festival, we got Crab Fest commemorative coins from 1974 and a pin from the silver jubilee celebration in 1982.

Kraft's operated in Kodiak for over 90 years. This
notebook with pre-printed shopping list is one
object that can tell the business's story long
after its closing. KHS, 2012-11-01.

Few of these objects are particularly glamorous, and someone may wonder what a museum would want them for in the first place. A notebook with a pre-printed shopping list from an old grocery store?  The value of many museum objects doesn’t necessarily rest in their beauty, or how much they cost, or their association with an important person, but in how they document and communicate everyday lives. These mundane objects are tied to specific places that existed in a specific moment in Kodiak’s past. While we can no longer go to Kraft’s to peruse their produce department, from the shopping list we can see that within the bins were onions, carrots, potatoes and, if you were lucky, asparagus.

This Tony's bar glass likely
dates to the early 1940s.
KHS, 2012-03-01.

During future Acquisitions Committee meetings, I ’m hoping to welcome more objects that relate to Kodiak’s businesses and industries. Please get in touch with the museum if you have a stash of local business memorabilia that you are interested in donating to the museum. Future generations will thank you!

Filipinos on Kodiak: Celebration and Inquiry

For the last 100 years, Kodiak's story is very much an immigrant story. The most current US census data lists Kodiak as 7% Latino and 20% people of Asian descent, and those numbers only reflect Kodiak residents, not seasonal workers temporarily living on the island. Fulbright Scholar Joefe Santarita spoke at the Baranov Museum on Filipino Kodiakans, and jokingly emphasized the question of why people from the tropics immigrate to Alaska by quoting an article on King Crab fishing that states "Alaska has cold, frigid, eat-into-your-soul weather." On a more serious note, Mr. Santarita spoke about a variety of socio-economic reasons that Filipinos have immigrated to this island. His talk helped inspire Baranov Museum staff to launch both a celebration and inquiry into Filipino culture on Kodiak.

Our first celebratory event was a Family Fun Night hosted with the Filipino American Association of Kodiak (www.filamkodiak.org/). Members of FilAm Kodiak prepared a veritable feast of foods ranging from bibinka to lumpia, and highlights included dressing up in traditional Filipino garb and learning how to dance. FilAm Kodiak President Mary Guilas-Hawver took the lead to engage the variety of participating community members in Filipino culture, and fun was had by all.

FilAm Kodiak's support of the Baranov Museum did not end with family fun night; they are now our partner in a project called Kodiak's Filipino Community Stories (KFCS) that received $8,500 of funding from the Alaska Humanities Forum. The Baranov Museum, FilAm Kodiak, and Media Action (www.mediactionproject.org) planned KFCS to engage high-school students in ethnography and digital storytelling about the history of Filipino Americans on Kodiak, culminating in an exhibit featuring these digital stories during October 2012, National Filipino American History Month.

While we will keep you posted about how the KFCS project unfolds, we hope that you consider the family photographs and family objects in your life that shed light on Kodiak's Filipino history and consider sharing them with the museum and this project. Even the most seemingly trivial items can contain a world of stories; an old, tattered pair of extra tuffs your grandpa wore in a cannery, a western union receipt documenting money sent home, a recipe handed down through the generations.