Eskimo Helmet Worth A Bundle

ANCHORAGE, Alaska - When Marcelyn Carroll trudged off to a San Francisco taping of PBS' popular "Antiques Roadshow" two years ago, she had no idea that the object her family kept stored in a black plastic bag for years would stir such a fuss.

Now Carroll and her grown children are on the prowl for a museum to display what turned out to be a rare hunting helmet made by Alaska Eskimos in the early 1800s. The helmet is worth at least $65,000.

There are only about 25 such hunting helmets in existence, and all but a few are in museums. None of those museums is in Alaska.

Lydia Black, a retired University of Alaska anthropologist whose book "Glory Remembered" is considered the leading scholarly work on Native hunting helmets, said she'd like to see it on display in Alaska.

"I have a suggestion," Black said in a telephone interview from Kodiak. "The Alaska Native Heritage Center in Anchorage could use it."

But Carroll, who lives in Monte Sereno, Calif., near San Jose, said she wants to keep the helmet closer to her family's home.

"I just think that this is a wonderful thing that this hasn't been destroyed," Carroll said. "Who knows how much people have thrown away."

Series of coincidences

The Eskimo helmet could have met such a demise if not for an odd set of coincidences and the trained eye of an expert appraiser at the San Francisco "Roadshow" taping.

The program features appraisers who travel to cities nationwide to evaluate antiques and collectibles that viewers bring in. The best items are featured on the program.

Carroll and her daughter Stephanie decided to take a few items to a 1997 taping in San Francisco after they discovered on a trip to France that she owned a doll that could be worth a small fortune.

They took the doll to the taping to confirm its value. On the way out the door, Carroll said, they decided also to take along that strange item her father, Gerald Birk, had bought years ago at the San Jose flea market he religiously went to every Sunday.

"My dad had an interest in Alaska ever since he went up there as a teenager and worked in a salmon cannery," Carroll said. Her father operated a San Jose-area auto repair business for much of his life.

"When he saw the helmet, I guess it just inspired him to buy it," she said. "He took it to several universities, and they could not trace it, so we're never sure what its origins were."

After "Roadshow" appraisers looked at Carroll's doll, she and her daughter seriously weighed whether to head home.

"I have to say, we were so embarrassed," Stephanie Carroll said on the broadcast, because they knew so little about what was wrapped up in the black plastic bag.

As it turned out, the appraiser was one of the world's leading dealers in Alaska Native artifacts.

"What your father found is an exceptionally rare Eskimo hunting helmet," Donald Ellis told the stunned women on the program, which is still being rerun on public broadcasting stations.

"There are less than 25 of these known to exist in the world today," Ellis said. "Coincidentally, in the 22 years I've been in business, there have been only four of these in the market place."

He said his store bought one for his gallery at a Massachusetts auction in June 1997 for $66,000.

The helmet is made from a single piece of wood, which Ellis said is "quite miraculously split, steamed, bent and then sewn" into shape. He identified Carroll's helmet as coming from the Norton Sound region.

Black went further. She said she was able to "very clearly" identify it as a Yupik Eskimo helmet used during hunts somewhere between Norton Sound and Bristol Bay, probably in the early to mid-1800s.

She said helmets made by Natives in Prince William Sound, the Kodiak archipelago and the Aleutian Islands were generally much more elaborate and colorful. While the helmets were used by Natives hunting for seals and walruses through much of the 19th century, their use faded fast after the United States purchased the Alaska territory from Russia in 1867 and had disappeared by the turn of the century.

Though worn on the head, Black said, the helmet involves "exceptionally complicated symbolism" for Native people.

"It transforms the wearer," she said. "It permits him to `see' what the normal eye cannot. It gave the hunter power, the power to kill and to give life. It transformed the wearer into someone who could `see' animals, be victorious in the hunt and return home (with his kill) to bring life to his people."

Carroll said she hopes the helmet produces a lasting legacy for her father, who died six years ago.

"Our aim is to lend it to a museum that would give some recognition to my dad," she said. "We don't want to sell it. We want it to be a tribute to my dad."