Wrangell elder's headpiece cleared for return from Wisconsin museum

A headpiece worn by Tom Ukas, a Kiks.ádi elder from Wrangell, can be returned to Alaska on or after Sept. 23, under a federal notice published last month.

The Logan Museum of Anthropology at Beloit College in Wisconsin completed a federal inventory and determined the headpiece is the physical remains of one person of Native American ancestry — Ukas, whose Tlingit name was Ghunaaneistí, of the Kiks.ádi Sun House in Wrangell. He lived from 1879 to 1973. The notice describes the item as a cloth cap covered in matted tufts of human hair; by Ukas's own account, it was made from scalps taken in war. During consultation, the museum found a bound top knot on it, which it said supports his account, "as top knots are worn by warriors going into war."

The return won't happen on its own. A written request has to come from the Central Council of the Tlingit and Haida Indian Tribes of Alaska, a lineal descendant, or another tribe that can show cultural affiliation. Until one is filed, Sept. 23 is only the earliest a repatriation could occur.

The headpiece left Alaska through a chain of collectors. Axel Rasmussen, a school superintendent in Wrangell and later Skagway, collected Native items from the communities he served and from regional dealers between 1921 and 1944. His collection passed through the Portland Art Museum, then to a private buyer, and the Logan Museum bought the headpiece in 1963. That same Rasmussen collection has yielded returns before — the Portland Art Museum repatriated nine objects to the Tlingit in 2022.

The Wrangell headpiece is one of many. Of 16 repatriation notices mentioning Alaska published so far in 2026, 15 concern Alaska ancestors or belongings. Since the start of 2024, the National Park Service has published 80 notices touching Alaska, more than half of them repatriations.

Some are far larger. Case Western Reserve University identified the remains of at least 29 people — from Nunivak Island, Point Hope and Point Barrow — donated in 1931 by a dentistry professor who had traveled to Alaska to study Inuit dentition on a Public Health Service expedition. Other notices reach back more than a century: remains taken from Point Hope in 1884, now held by the Defense Health Agency, and an Aleutian Islands ancestor acquired around 1888 and accessioned by the Field Museum in 1894.

Museums are returning cultural belongings too — among them a Chilkat blanket, a potlatch ring hat and a mask to the Tlingit and Haida, and a Tsimshian amhalaayt, or chiefly headdress, that a collector bought in Wrangell in 1939, the second Wrangell item on this year's list. The Chugach National Forest is returning a roughly 15-foot dugout canoe, with the Native Village of Chenega holding priority for it.

The notices are written by the institutions that hold these things, and no tribe, council or community member speaks in any of them. The one Alaska Native voice in the record is Ukas's own, in the account he gave before his death in 1973. And the notices record only that a repatriation may occur, never that one did. For the Wrangell headpiece, the next step is a written request — and the earliest it can be honored is Sept. 23.