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For Tom Bennett, arriving for work means opening the doors to Alaska's history.
He's the curator of Wells Fargo's Alaska Heritage Museum, home to a broad collection that defines
the cultures of the last frontier.
The count stands at about 6,500 objects of all kinds, so some of them are ancient, 5,6,7000
year old artifacts from the native cultures up here.
Items like this parka made from squirrel, wolverine, beaver and wolf pelts...And this
Bering Sea kayak, made of sealskin and driftwood...Demonstrate the ingenuity Alaska natives employed to survive.
As you move through the different display cases, we tend to tell a story of not only
how hard it was, but how effective they were in dealing with their environment, also how
much that they understood the environment, that they lived extremely closely with it.
The collection also contains decorative items created specifically for trade - an important
part of Alaskan heritage.
We�ve had several Russian researchers come in from various museums and libraries, we�re
getting quite a few Europeans come in and even some South American folks coming up to
find out what connections AK has to their past and certainly we do. Those connections
begin with the explorers, and all the trade that went on.
The museum also makes "generational" connections for visitors like Vincent Delia and his son,
Andrew.
I wanted to show him from the Eskimo side, he�s Inupiat and Yupik�and I wanted to
come here because they have all his heritage in one place and I could just come to one
spot and show him all the tools that his ancestors used.
It�s really quite common for them to point out objects in the cases and tell us that�s
my aunty, that�s my uncle who made that�even the little kids know who their relatives are
who made these objects in here. And that strikes home to them every time.
Among the museum's most popular items is this model of the Cutter Bear - a famous ship in
U.S. Coast Guard history...
The "Cave Woman" painting by Sydney Laurence...
The wooly mammoth tusk, which is between twelve and fifteen thousand years old...
And these baskets made from baleen - a fibrous part of some whales' mouths.
Fantastic. Especially for a free museum. The quality of the pieces are exceptional.
I�ve always seen them in books, so to see it in real life is fantastic. To see something
a hundred or a thousand years old that someone else made, a real person, it�s not just
a photo in a book�I get a connection to the person who made it � almost imagine
myself there.
Making those connections was the aim of Elmer Rasmusen, a banker who collect art and artifacts
from his native state.
His passion resulted in what is today the core collection at Anchorage Museum and the
University of Alaska Fairbanks library.
People are always surprised. They�re pretty interested in AK and want
to know what�s going on, what life is like, what things came before them, so I�m just
delighted to be able to do that, expose people outside to what we have, to this whole connectedness
of WF to history.