Haida artist. Memorial Pole (k’áal). about 1870. wood. Gift of the University of Pennsylvania Museum. 1946.252.

height: 267 in, 678.1800 cm; width: 37 in, 93.9800 cm; depth: 26 in, 66.0400 cm

Native Arts

Indigenous Arts of North America

This object is currently on view

This pole depicts a grandmother who instructed the children of the clan. She holds a medicine man’s cane and wears a spruce-root hat. The figure at the bottom is a frog. The old woman taught her grandchildren not to harm any living thing. This pole tells a story about how she cured a boy who became ill as a result of teasing frogs.

Haida artist John Wallace sent this and one other nineteenth-century pole from Sukkwan, Alaska, to San Francisco for display in the 1939 exhibition, "Indian Court," which was organized by Denver Art Museum curator Frederic Douglas; René d’Harnoncourt, general manager of the Indian Arts and Crafts Board and later director at the Museum of Modern Art; and German architect Henry Klumb for the Golden Gate International Exposition in San Francisco. This memorial pole was possibly carved in honor of Dwight’s wife, John's mother. Originally this pole was much larger, but several of the rings and the topmost carving were removed. After the exposition, John Wallace sold both the historical poles to the Fairmount Park Association in Philadelphia, which turned them over to the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology. At the urging of Frederic Douglas, the Penn Museum gave them to Denver in 1946.