The Tlingit in Sitka

A rare window into the changing lives of Native Alaskans between the late 1800s and 1920s

Lured north by the Klondike gold rush, Elbridge W. Merrill settled in Sitka, Alaska, and took up a career as a professional photographer. Merrill developed a good rapport with the town’s Indigenous Tlingit community, and his images of the Tlingit provide an invaluable historical and ethnographic record of their daily lives, religious life, and art.

Sergei Kan presents a first-ever collection of Merrill’s photographs, which includes images of important Tlingit events like funerals and a famous ku.éex’(potlatch), commissioned portraits, and subsistence activities and other scenes of everyday life. Respected and admired by Sitka’s entire multiethnic community, Merrill also photographed locals with Russian–Native Alaskan ancestry and Euro-American backgrounds and expressed a passion for Alaska’s spectacular settings through images of nature. Drawing on forty-five years of research, Kan complements the collection with an expert biography of Merrill while analyzing the ways he portrayed Sitka’s Indigenous people.

Illustrated with 150 images, The Tlingit in Sitka invites readers to discover images of Tlingit life in early colonial history and the artist who dedicated his life to recording it.

Sergei Kan is professor of anthropology at Dartmouth College. He is author of Symbolic Immortality: Tlingit Potlatch of the Nineteenth Century and A Russian American Photographer in Tlingit Country: Vincent Soboleff in Alaska.