Inscribing and Contesting Power through Re(creation) and Souvenirs in Late-19th-Century Alaska
Chilkat Tlingit Gambling Set 
National Museum of the American Indian | wood, moose hide/skin | purchased from B.A. Whalen in 1905
Image Credit: National Museum of the American Indian
Recreation and Reasons for Collection
Gambling Sets, Ivory Cribbage Boards, and the Implications of Museum Procurement
39 sticks, each rounded and polished and painted, clink together in their moose-hide carrying bag. When they are spilled onto the ground, it becomes apparent that all are partially striped, some feature geometric designs, and one appears to be mostly blank. In one telling of how the game is played, opposing teams huddle together, spinning the sticks between their outstretched hands before dropping them to the ground. Players predict in which direction the stripes will fall as scores of people watch, humming along to a drum beat played behind each side (Alaska Native Connections: Sharing Knowledge 2005). Often a gambling game played while fishing, it bears some similarity to slahal, which is played by Indigenous people living on the northwest coast of Washington, to the south of the region in which this Haida game is played (Cunningham 1998). Early white American scholarship about Alaskan Native games declared that “the games of the Eskimo… show always greater simplicity, lack of tradition, and degradation of form;” yet the complex rules and often closely guarded strategies of this game suggest that this racialized assessment was errant if not malicious (Culin 190, 59). 
The National Museum for the American Indian notes that this set was “purchased by George Heye in 1905 from Bernard A. Whalen (1869-1942), who dealt in ‘Alaskan Indian Curios’ and operated Whalen's Curio Store in Los Angeles, California” (National Museum of the American Indian 2001). Heye, a former Wall Street mogul, was responsible for the collection of three-quarters of a million Native American artifacts now part of the NMAI; the museum holds several similar gambling sets collected from Tlingit and Haida communities in the late 1890s and early 1900s (Infinity of Nations 2022). 
Interestingly, though, the museum holds nearly as many ivory cribbage boards as it does bundled gambling sets from these communities. That museum collectors focused on collecting Alaskan Native artifacts for purportedly anthropological reasons – even the prolific and particularly thorough Heye – were equally interested in procuring the made-for-sale souvenir items fashioned by as they were in the games played (to this day) by members of these Indigenous communities may hint at the impetus behind their collection. Would an anthropologically-focused collection not be more interested in the longstanding, traditional recreation of the culture being studied, rather than a souvenir trading item that originated five to ten years prior? Perhaps these boards were mostly collectible, then, for their value as art pieces, their value as precious ivory specimens, and their value as trophies of conquest –  rather than items of anthropologically historical interest. 
What does this mean for the reasons that (mostly) Alaskan Native artisans had for crafting these boards?
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REFERENCES
Alaska Native Connections: Sharing Knowledge. “Gambling Sticks.” Smithsonian Institution. 2005: https://alaska.si.edu/record.asp?id=33
Culin, Stewart. “American Indian Games (1902).” American Anthropologist 5, no. 1 (1903): 58–64. http://www.jstor.org/stable/659360.
Cunningham, James Everett.. "Slahal: More than a Game with a Song." University of Washington,  1998: https://www.proquest.com/dissertations-theses/slahal-more-than-game-with-song/docview/304462944/se-2?accountid=10422.
Infinity of Nations. “Art and History in the Collections of the National Museum of the American Indian: George Heye’s Legacy: An Unparalleled Collection.” National Museum of the American Indian. Retrieved May 31, 2022: https://americanindian.si.edu/exhibitions/infinityofnations/george-heye.html