
Skidegate House Models: From Haida Gwaii to the Chicago World’s Fair & Beyond
Review By Alexandra M. Peck
January 16, 2025
Robin K. Wright’s 2024 book, Skidegate House Models: From Haida Gwaii to the Chicago World’s Fair & Beyond, offers an intriguing and comprehensive case study of a medium that has received little attention within the Native Northwest Coast art historical canon: miniatures and model replicas. Whereas Jack Davy’s So Much More Than Art: Indigenous Miniatures of the Pacific Northwest (2021) or Michael D. Hall & Pat Glascock’s Carvings & Commerce: Model Totem Poles, 1880-2010 (2011) detail various accounts of regional miniatures largely created for the tourist trade, Wright’s new monograph goes a step further by presenting one particular example in depth. Her entire book is devoted to a carved and painted model of Skidegate, a major Haida village located on central Haida Gwaii. In addition to analyzing the model village’s numerous contributions (ode to a significant Haida site, turn of the century World’s Fair novelty, tool of cultural resistance by Haida artisans, etc), Wright adeptly utilizes archives and museum collections to track down missing components of the replica village while seamlessly weaving Haida voices into the book’s fabric. She demonstrates that, despite its diminutive stature, the recreated village of Skidegate possesses monumental implications for reinterpreting Haida history and modern Indigenous livelihoods.
Employing multi-modal methods and an interdisciplinary approach, Wright’s book reveals the unique history of this miniature village, commissioned for the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair. Created by 17 Haida artists from Skidegate, the mock village included approximately 30 longhouses and 42 totem poles, all meticulously crafted based on memories of actual architecture at Skidegate. On the one hand, World’s Fairs and other international expositions were rooted in a 19th century desire to exhibit, classify, and categorize various human cultures—often problematically claiming how non-Western societies had “advanced” from their supposedly primitive state as a result of colonial or imperial influence. Yet, Wright flips the script by examining how Haida individuals resisted such portrayals and instead exercised their authority at the 1893 exhibition to showcase their rich artistic skill and to refute the notion that Haida communities had disappeared in the face of disease epidemics, economic instability, forced conversions, and Canada’s Potlatch Ban. Drawing upon decades of collaborative ethnographic research with Haida leaders such as Nika Collison, Executive Director and Curator of the Haida Gwaii Museum at Skidegate, Wright highlights the importance of culturally informed scholarship, as well as the relevance of the model village for contemporary Haida descendants.
Although the book consists of three chapters, a majority of Skidegate House Models is dedicated to documenting dozens of individual components of the replica village, detailing singular totem poles, longhouses, and grave monuments that, when displayed together, constituted the entire village. As the Chicago World’s Fair concluded, the set became divorced, with pieces of the replica village relocated to various museum collections (including Chicago’s Field Museum of Natural History) or seemingly lost altogether. While Wright’s efforts to trace these misplaced models and chronicle each of the village’s structures are certainly admirable, the average reader may be overwhelmed by the sheer amount of detail contained in the book. For example, Wright numbers every piece and describes each of the miniature structures’ respective Haida clans and families, accompanied by nearly 200 photographs and appendices of Skidegate’s chiefs and historical longhouses. As such, Skidegate House Models is best suited for an audience of art historians, anthropologists, and museum studies scholars with a precise interest in Native Northwest material culture, or Haida individuals seeking more information regarding their own cultural heritage. Yet, any reader will observe that Wright sets a high standard for herself, combining her characteristic expertise and masterful research to culminate in an excellent tome that urges readers to reconsider the role of miniature replicas as valuable expressions of cultural defiance, continuity, and sovereignty for past, present, and future Indigenous communities.
References Cited
Davy, Jack. So Much More Than Art: Indigenous Miniatures of the Pacific Northwest. Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada: University of British Columbia Press (2021).
Hall, Michael D. & Pat Glascock. Carvings & Commerce: Model Totem Poles, 1880-2010. Seattle, Washington: University of Washington Press (2011).
Publication Information
Wright, Robin K. Skidegate House Models: From Haida Gwaii to the Chicago World’s Fair & Beyond. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2024.