Person/Family Name
Lockwood, Dunbar
MediumSilver Gelatin Print
Dimensions2 1/2 × 3 in. (6.4 × 7.6 cm)
Donor credit lineGift of the Estate of Nancy-Caroll Draper
Object number2008.21.230
Institutional Credit LineCourtesy of the New Bedford Whaling Museum
DescriptionDraper and Lockwood standing next to an arctic dwelling in front of a wooded area.Label TextFrom April 1913 through September 1914, the schooner Polar Bear, captained by Louis Lane, took nineteen men on a ten-thousand-mile journey across the North Pacific and Western Arctic, from Seattle through the Aleutian Islands, around Alaska, and to Siberia (fig. 1.15). The museum holds the archive for the voyage of the Polar Bear, comprising approximately six hunded photographic prints and negatives and the diaries of four crew. The initial objective of this voyage was to collect natural history specimens, but the men also hunted bowhead whales, due to the high demand for baleen. The crew included seamen, engineers, two Alaskan natives, five sport hunters from Harvard, and two taxidermist assistants. Over eighteen months, the crew killed hundreds of arctic birds, polar bears, walrus, mountain sheep, and whales. They skinned and preserved everything except the whales. Photographer Will Hudson documented much of the journey, including an overland excursion with Lane, Eben Draper, and Dunbar Lockwood, when the schooner was iced in for eight months. They also crossed paths with the concurrent Canadian Arctic Expedition, which lasted from 1913 to 1916. Organized as a scientific expedition in the Arctic Circle, led by Vilhjalmur Stefansson, and originally sponsored by the National Geographic Society and the American Museum of Natural History, the expedition aimed to find a new continent north of the Canadian Archipelago. The expedition gained notoriety when their vessel was crushed in the ice and 40 percent of the crew died.Canadian and US federal organizations often partnered with scientific organizations and funded or supported Arctic explorations like these, intent on mapping and territorial exploration for expansionist purposes. They also aimed to collect and catalog Arctic species to exploit natural resources. Finally, such expeditions facilitated encounters with Indigenous communities, who were similarly studied by outsiders through the lens of ethnography or pseudoscientific racial science. Euro-American views of Arctic environs and Indigenous lifeways frequently misunderstood and misrepresented Native subsistence living. Settlers brought different cultural values and expectations to a new landscape, one that was unfamiliar to them, but which Native communities had known and thrived in for thousands of years. Indeed, as Karen Oslund argues, a perception of scarcity was cultivated by settler colonists who failed to recognize the impact of their own agenda and activities on the landscape and lifeways of Native people. This false worldview then created a “problem” that needed to be solved by governments and settlers, leading to “solutions,” like the introduction of reindeer or Euro-American domestic practices unsuited to the Arctic terrain and season-driven calendar. These practices were part of larger systemic efforts in North America to eradicate Native people through assimilation, dislocation, cultural erasure, and genocide. Eradication was implemented via wildlife and game management laws, the slaughter of sled dogs, the residential school system, disc numbers (Inuit ID tags), Project Surname, and healthcare removal, among other initiatives. Photographs like these therefore document a period of intense cultural pressure on Western Arctic communities, and should be understood within the broader context of settler colonialism.ProvenanceThese photographs picture people across Inuit Nunaat taken during periods of intense colonial pressure and extractive, violent encounter (violence in many forms). NBWM is considering how we should address culturally sensitive materials like these in the collection. Our work in reckoning with these collections (and others like them), their histories and legacies with descendant communities, and our responsibilities toward researchers is ongoing. We strive to fulfill our responsibility, to be sensitive to content, traditional knowledge, and our role as stewards of these items, while ensuring that their use does not perpetuate colonial patterns of oppression. If you have a comment, please contact: curatorial@whalingmuseum.org
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Lockwood, Dunbar
Lockwood, Dunbar
Lockwood, Dunbar
