UNIDENTIFIED TLINGIT OR TSIMSHIAN ARTIST
Speaker's Staff, c. 1880
wood and pigment, 35 x 4.75 x 1 in (88.9 x 12.1 x 2.5 cm)
unsigned.

Provenance
The Ralph and Patricia Altman Collection, Southern California;
A New York Collection.

Rather shorter than a typical speaker’s staff, at just under three feet tall, this may have functioned as a walking stick for an elderly ritualist. It was made from a remarkable piece of wood, grown with a right angle that was trimmed down to become a handgrip. The thin shaft is embellished with slender totemic figures only a little larger than the staff itself. The two figures, a wolf and a human, are snugly entwined on the staff. The sculpture of the wolf’s head reflects a Tsimshian sensibility in the formation of the eye socket, snout, and nostrils. The human figure exhibits a face style that could be either Tsimshian or Tlingit, suggesting that the staff’s origin might have been among the southern Tlingit of Tongass village, where Tsimshian sculptural influences can be seen among the totem poles and other carvings from that region.

Steven C. Brown

References: For a Tlingit staff or cane of similarly slender proportions see First Arts, Dec. 2020, Lot 40; for a Tlingit model pole of very slender proportions see First Arts, July 2021, Lot 17. See the chapter on staffs (including some similar examples) in Allen Wardwell, Tangible Visions: Northwest Coast Indian Shamanism and its Art, (New York: The Monacelli Press, 1996), pp. 218-233.