The predominant natives of southeastern Alaska are the Tlingit—the People of the Tides. They are believed to have settled the Panhandle and the Alexander Archipelago more than ten thousand years ago. The Tlingit (pronounced klink-kit) were hunter-gatherers and traders who typically lived on the coastline, moving between permanent winter villages and summer encampments, where they fished, foraged, and stockpiled food. They cremated their dead and marked milestones with lavish ceremonies, until missionaries, in the late nineteenth century, persuaded them to stop.

The Tlingit, at the height of their culture, had about eighty clans, who represented themselves with heraldic crests that almost always featured animals. A crest was considered a clan’s property: the Raven Dog Salmon people could not tell the stories or display the crest of the Wolf Killer Whale people without consequence. Crests were protected to the point of war.

Tlingits placed their crests on almost everything they owned—ladles, blankets, amulets, armor—to express solidarity with their clan and kinship with animals they considered “patrons.” In 1914, Livingston F. Jones, a Presbyterian missionary who spent years among the tribe, wrote that if a Tlingit “puts the image of his patron on his halibut hook, it will help him to have good success; on his paddle, to go safely over the deep; on his spoon, to protect him from poisonous foods; on his house, to bless his family.” Tlingits sometimes depicted clan images on the gabled fronts of their houses, and indoors on decorative wood screens.

They also carved totem poles. First, a carver selected a tall, wide log of Western red cedar, whose soft wood weathers well. He stripped the bark; dried the wood, if it was too damp for carving; and hollowed out one side with fire. The carver then shaped the pole’s face with knives and an adze. Using a brush made of porcupine hair, he painted the pole with mineral-based dyes; Tlingit colors were red, black, and, in moments of extravagance, blue-green. Carvers often sealed the finish with whale fat. A Smithsonian researcher once wrote that Alaska’s totem poles were “as beautiful and interesting as the Parthenon of the old Greeks.”

Poles stood just outside a house. Some rose thirty feet tall. The higher and more ornate the totem pole, the greater the status of its owner—the Tlingit equivalent of a Mercedes in the driveway. Stature was measured in accumulated possessions and in generosity. A Tlingit might spend years gathering pelts, blankets, and weapons, then give them all away in a feast, called a potlatch, which often featured a pole-raising. Before a totem pole went up, the host sometimes had slaves killed and thrown into the posthole. Some poles shamed wrongdoers—a brown bear biting the tail of a killer whale might broadcast an unpaid debt. Others were mortuary monuments holding the remains of the dead.

Totem poles were not objects of religious worship, but Tlingits considered them sacred, because they believed that everything in nature had a spirit, and because the poles commemorated significant people and events. Poles were to be left in place, to weather and eventually return to nature, unless a clan decided otherwise. The Tlingit believed strongly in respecting the landscape. One fable about an island spirit, which a tribal elder shared with Steve Langdon, an anthropologist at the University of Alaska, Anchorage, notes, “The island spirit helps those who observe the rules of good conduct and respect for wildlife. Misfortune is sure to come to those who are frivolous. . . . The spirit withdraws his protection from such people, and they are in danger of losing their canoes or their lives.”

It’s unclear exactly when the Tlingit began carving poles. Outsiders first reported seeing them in the eighteenth century, not long after the Haida, skilled carvers from what is now British Columbia, moved into southeastern Alaska. The golden age of totem poles is considered to be the nineteenth century, after Europeans introduced improved iron tools and before whites repressed native customs. By the end of that century, the Tlingit were growing wealthier through fishing and canneries, fur trading, and mining; totem-carving became less dignified as clansmen competed ostentatiously to make ever taller, prettier poles.

Southeastern Alaska contains hundreds of islands cut by a vast network of channels and fjords. The biggest island, Prince of Wales, had the most totem poles, and the village with the greatest number was Tuxecan. In 1916, a researcher counted a hundred and twenty-five poles there, and described them as strikingly elaborate and diverse in their imagery.

Tuxecan occupied a cove on the island’s northwest coast, backed by an ancient grove of cedar, hemlock, and spruce. Photographs from the turn of the twentieth century show a beach lined with rectangular plank houses and canoe runs, and boardwalks traversing gravel shallows. For generations, hundreds of Tlingit wintered there, but around 1900 they relocated south, to Klawock, where a Presbyterian school and Alaska’s first cannery had opened. Tuxecan remained standing, and clansmen visited occasionally, but without inhabitants the village deteriorated, as did its loose forest of totem poles. Some of the poles were taken to Klawock; others remained at Tuxecan, and as they aged they tilted, in a slow-motion game of pick-up sticks, until they fell. Then they were consumed by moss.

One particularly regal pole loomed over the southeastern corner of a large house on the beach. Nearly thirty feet tall, it had three crests. The topmost figure was a bird with folded wings. Below it was a human, which held a large finned sea creature at the base of its tail. The bottom crest was a fierce, furry animal—a bear or a wolf—sitting high on its haunches. One day, in the nineteen-thirties, the totem pole went missing. All that remained was a sawed stump.

When the Hollywood star John Barrymore wasn’t working, he liked to sail yachts. The sea afforded him the freedom and the peace that he felt he lacked on land. He often sailed using zodiacal charts—according to “Good Night, Sweet Prince,” a biography by his friend Gene Fowler, he was a devotee of astrology and had “an inborn trend toward mysticism.” Barrymore cruised mostly to Mexico, and kept a journal about his impressions, such as the thrill of “strange, fantastic, jagged rocks rearing out of the sea like gnomes’ castles.” He also enjoyed going to Alaska.

In 1929, Barrymore commissioned a new yacht. His third* wife, the actress Dolores Costello, was pregnant with their first child, Dede, and they christened the boat the Infanta. A hundred and twenty feet long, and made of riveted steel, the boat typically sailed at thirteen and a half knots, and accommodated about a dozen crew members. Barrymore, who liked to design silverware and flags for his boats, outfitted the Infanta with a dining room, a smoking room, a fireplace, and a piano. Newspapers described the yacht as the finest on the Pacific Coast.

Barrymore drank, which often made him miserable. (“He had a beachcomber’s taste for the cheaper grades of liquor,” Fowler wrote.) But the summer of 1931 was a happier period. He had temporarily sobered up, and had just given one of his most acclaimed film performances, in “Svengali.” Financially, he was having a record year, earning nearly half a million dollars.

The Barrymores set sail for Alaska, to hunt Kodiak bear. The Juneau shipping news noted the Infanta’s presence nearby on the twenty-sixth of June. By July, newspapers were reporting that Barrymore had killed a bear—a photograph that ran in the press showed him posing arm in arm with a massive dead grizzly. “Jack desperately wanted a son,” Carol Stein Hoffman later wrote, in “The Barrymores: Hollywood’s First Family.” “In Alaska, he heard the superstition that a woman who eats the heart of a bear will give birth to a male child.” The Barrymores’ son, John Drew Barrymore, was born the following year.

Several other photographs from the Alaska trip appeared in Hoffman’s book. One showed the Barrymores on Lemesurier Island—at the top of the Panhandle, near Glacier Bay—with a pioneer couple named Joe and Muz Ibach. The Ibachs, native New Yorkers, had moved to Alaska to prospect for gold. Joe staked a few claims in 1924, just before President Calvin Coolidge declared the Glacier Bay area a national monument. When Joe learned that he couldn’t legally work the veins that he’d been mining, he smuggled out bags of ore and stacked them in his shed. He also worked as a trapper and a guide. Travellers to the Alaska Panhandle inevitably heard about the Ibachs, and often put in at Willoughby Cove, to visit them. The novelist Rex Beach, who found the Ibachs living in a comfortable house with electricity and running water, said of Joe that “anything less than complete independence irked him like a shirt of nettles.” Another photograph in Hoffman’s book showed five unidentified men, four in white sailor caps, using ropes to lower to the ground a carved totem pole: a bird atop a human holding a large finned sea creature, atop a bear or a wolf.

Barrymore’s passions included animals, art, and decorating. As a child in New York City, he became a regular presence at the Central Park Zoo. The keepers eventually allowed him inside the guardrail at the tiger cage—he liked to reach through the bars and pet the animal’s head. (“This cat is in love with him,” a zookeeper once said. “Cries like a dame when he goes away.”) Barrymore later kept Australian parakeets and Chinese magpies, and he lavished attention—including valet services—on a pet monkey named Clementine. His king vulture, Maloney, lovingly groomed his mustache with its enormous beak.

In 1917, five years before becoming famous for playing Hamlet on Broadway, Barrymore, recently separated from his first wife, rented the top floor of a four-story house at 132 West Fourth Street. His collecting habit was evident in displays of items related to the sea, including model ships, a captain’s wheel, a ship’s bell, and vintage ocean charts. Inspired by a trip to Italy, he gave the place a makeover: pink striped wallpaper, mauve taffeta curtains. He draped saffron chiffon beneath the skylight, and hung a lantern shaped like a caravel. To “age” the walls, he smudged them with candle smoke. On the roof, he installed a cedar hedge, wisteria, beehives, and a fountain, and had a carpenter build a small cabin as crooked as “a Nuremberg poet’s home.” Barrymore called the apartment the Alchemist’s Corner.

In the fall of 1927, soon after Barrymore signed on to star in “The Sea Beast,” an adaptation of “Moby-Dick,” he bought an estate, called Bella Vista, on the edge of Beverly Hills. The director King Vidor had built the house at an ear-popping altitude—the views of Los Angeles were grand. Immediately, Barrymore commenced redecorating. He hired a Japanese gardener with “power over plants,” and added four acres and many new buildings to the compound. After he and Costello returned from a honeymoon trip to the Galápagos, where they hunted and fished, Barrymore mounted their spoils in a trophy room. The estate ultimately consisted of sixteen structures, including an aviary, and fifty-five baroquely furnished rooms, among them a rathskeller. There were six swimming pools, a skeet-shooting range, a bowling green, and a treasury of artifacts, which included a pair of Ecuadorian shrunken heads and a dinosaur egg given to Barrymore by his friend the explorer Roy Chapman Andrews. Barrymore wanted to be surrounded by all the riches of the world.

At Bella Vista, the Alaskan totem pole found a new home, overlooking the Barrymores’ grounds. It had been visibly scarred by its removal: the pole had likely been cut into pieces on Prince of Wales Island, presumably to ease its transport to California on the deck of Barrymore’s yacht. The artifact was impressive enough to be used, in the late thirties, as a prop in “Spawn of the North,” a Barrymore film about salmon fishing in Alaska. Although the actor was photographed posing proudly next to his prize, he wasn’t as delighted with it as one might expect. Fowler’s biography noted that “an American settler on Lemesurier Island” warned Barrymore that removing “such a tribal emblem from its appointed place meant bad luck.” Fowler added, “Barrymore said that he halfway believed that the tribal gods, in whose behalf the pole had been erected, ‘might take a notion into their whimsical noggins to wreak vengeance on the thief.’ ” This seems to be as close as Barrymore ever got to a public confession that he had taken the pole.

“The utility bills for my secret other life are going through the roof.”

Barrymore’s final years were filled with bad luck. By the time he died, in May, 1942, he had divorced four times, and was bankrupt. He was still drinking, he had disabling headaches, and he was in a serious car accident. Dolores had accused him of hitting a member of their staff, and Barrymore, afraid that he would be committed to an asylum, temporarily fled the country. When Dolores left the marriage—they divorced in 1935—she made no claims on the shrunken heads, or the dinosaur egg, or the yacht, which Barrymore was forced to sell. Lionel Barrymore used to say that his brother’s misfortunes started with the totem pole.

In the nineteen-nineties, a National Park Service cultural-resources specialist named Wayne Howell stumbled upon the story of Barrymore and the totem pole while trying to track down missing Tlingit artifacts from Glacier Bay. Howell, an archeologist by training, became obsessed with figuring out how Barrymore had acquired his trophy. He searched for Barrymore’s sea diaries, which he hoped would provide answers. Had Barrymore seen the pole from the water and headed straight for it? Had Joe Ibach helped him to remove it? Had Barrymore wanted it for mystical reasons, or had he simply thought that it would look good on his lawn?

Howell spent years investigating Barrymore’s acquisition of the pole, before dropping his quest. But the mystery of the sea diaries has lingered. Recently, Hoffman, the biographer, told me that Barrymore’s grandson, John Blyth Barrymore, might have them. Barrymore is the half brother of Drew Barrymore, and their father is the late actor John Drew Barrymore, who, according to family lore, owed his existence to a grizzly’s pan-fried heart.

“Oh, that story is true,” Barrymore told me, when we met in Los Angeles. He is sixty, with blue eyes and bushy white hair. He has the aquiline Barrymore nose and teardrop chin, and within thirty seconds of our first handshake he was quoting his grandfather in an affably mannered stage voice. (“Sex: the thing that takes up the least amount of time and causes the most trouble.”)

We sat on the patio of a Starbucks. He gave me his business card, which read, “Actor, Director, Writer, Acting & Speech Coach, Accent Normalization, Software Developer, Computer Consultant.” On a MacBook, he searched for digital scans of his grandfather’s journals. He talked extremely fast as he worked, mentioning speakeasies, syphilis, tarot cards, the Sultan of Brunei (“Fuck that guy!”), and a memoir he is writing. “There are still a couple of skeletons that haven’t tumbled out of the old Barrymore closet,” he said. Proving his point, he called up a snapshot of his nude, wild-haired father, in old age, demonstrating the projectile effects of a garden-hose colonic.

John Barrymore died twelve years before his grandson was born. The only time that John Blyth Barrymore paid a serious visit to Bella Vista was at his own wedding reception, in 1993, with the permission of the new owners. The sea diaries preserved on the MacBook turned out to involve only trips to Mexico. He showed me a piece of his own writing, though; it read, in part:

My grandfather was quite a collector. Upon my grandmother’s death in March of 1979, my father, John Barrymore, and I began to enjoy a greatly improved standard of living supported by selling off the Barrymoreabelia we had pirated from her estate. There must have been five hundred pounds of silver, including Georgian Knights candelabra, Georgian silver flatware, and dozens and dozens of silver plates and bowls. . . . Also several triptychs and other old, valuable religious icons and a set of plique-a-jour goblets made for the coronation of Czar Nicholas.

The totem pole survived the Barrymoreabelia diaspora, at least temporarily. Cracking and fading, it remained standing at Bella Vista for some time. A water spout had been installed up the length of the pole, turning it into a fountain. Fowler, in his biography, noted that atop the bird’s head “a fern grew incongruously . . . like the hair of Signor Arturo Toscanini dyed green.”

But, by the time Barrymore’s grandson had his wedding reception at Bella Vista, the pole was gone.

Vincent Price, the star of many horror films, started collecting exotic objects as a young boy in Missouri. By the age of twelve, he was prowling junk stores and buying art. In Rome, as a teen-ager, he pocketed “a piece of bone” from the catacombs, and for years, he later wrote in a memoir, he kept it “tenderly entombed in a tuft of cotton, cradled in a German-silver matchbox.”

His success in Hollywood allowed him to indulge this acquisitive instinct. In 1950, in France, before shooting a film, he and his wife, Mary, cruised around in a Standard sedan, shopping. They returned to America, he later recalled in his memoir, with “about twenty drawings, fifty copper molds, enough white faience china for a sit-down dinner for thirty, and two of the most precarious objects ever brought to these shores—a delicate little Greek angel of the fifth century and a monstrously heavy sixteenth-century bronze king from Benin.” One of the Prices’ greatest finds was a huge stone Huastecan “sun god,” from Mexico, which was languishing in a storage room in Laguna Beach.

Barrymore acted in order to support his hunting and fishing; Price acted to support his aesthetic tastes. He was a celebrated gourmand—a popular cookbook that he wrote with Mary, “A Treasury of Great Recipes,” is being reissued this fall. Over the years, the Prices amassed a serious art collection; in 1957, they donated ninety works to East Los Angeles College, whose galleries are now called the Vincent Price Art Museum. Before abstract art had found a place in museums, he inspired other celebrities to collect such work; Dennis Hopper saw Price’s many abstracts and later said, “It just tore my head off.”

In Los Angeles, Price hunted for what he called “ethnic” and “primitive” art at a shop, on La Cienega Boulevard, owned by a collector named Ralph Altman. Describing the early L.A. art scene for a Smithsonian oral-history project, Joni Gordon, a gallery owner, talked about bringing “flea-markety” finds to Altman. She recalled, “I would set sail in the morning with maybe five dollars in my pocket, and I would come home in the afternoon” with “an ancient Greek pot, American Indian pottery.” Altman would say to her, “Where did you find that? There’s a pot like that at the Getty, or Metropolitan.” He would then tell her, “Go back and get more!”

The Prices bought a number of objects from Altman, but the centerpiece was John Barrymore’s totem pole. They had a four-bedroom house in Benedict Canyon, and the pole was installed, amid cactus, at the edge of the patio. Price’s daughter, Victoria, a designer in New Mexico, told me, “We lived on a quarter acre, and the house had a lot of different outdoor spaces. The outdoor space where we spent the most time had a big fire pit, with benches and chairs around it, and the totem pole was right there. It was the focal point.” A photograph of the pole was featured in the Prices’ cookbook and in “I Like What I Know,” the actor’s “visual autobiography,” published in 1959. (A partial caption of one photo: “A totem pole in your back yard, Mr. Price? Of course! Doesn’t everybody have one?”) He showed off the pole to Edward R. Murrow, on “Person to Person.” And in his memoir Price wrote that he considered the totem pole “sculptural and dignified and beautiful,” with “lovely warm browns and reds.”

Vincent Price and his wife, Mary, on their patio, in 1958.
Vincent Price and his wife, Mary, on their patio, in 1958. Courtesy Victoria Price

At the end of his life, as Price was dying, of cancer, Victoria interviewed him about his art collection, and said, “Tell me the totem-pole story.”

“Ralph Altman had heard this totem pole was going to be sold because John Barrymore had died, and it was on his estate,” Price replied. “And the story was that Barrymore had had a yacht and used to take people up to Vancouver and British Columbia, and cruise around the islands. And he came to one island one night and in a village there were all these totem poles in situ. They were burial posts.”

He went on, “So Barrymore took a fancy to this one, and asked them if he could buy it. But they wouldn’t sell it, because Mom and Dad were buried in the post. So that night he sent some sailors ashore”—the Infanta had two tenders—“and they cut it open, threw Mom and Dad in the creek, sawed it in three pieces, and brought it away on the ship with them.” Altman later learned of the pole. Price said, “When Ralph heard about this thing, he went and bought it. And then we bought it from Ralph. We had to spend quite a bit of money having it preserved, because of the water damage.”

He added, “But it was great fun to have. There were a great many jokes that it was the biggest erection in Benedict Canyon.”

When Howell, the archeologist at the National Park Service, was trying to find the pole, he discovered that it had moved one last time. In 1981, the Prices, now divorced, had donated it to what is now the Honolulu Museum of Art.

Steve Langdon, the University of Alaska anthropologist, eventually learned of Howell’s inquiry. A Tlingit specialist, Langdon had had his own indirect encounter with Vincent Price: while researching the ancestral villages of Prince of Wales Island at an archive in Ketchikan, Alaska, he had found, in a file on Tuxecan, a baffling photograph of Price posing with an enormous totem pole.

Langdon had spent four decades studying the Tlingit, and had even lived among them for several years, and he doubted that one of the tribe’s totem poles could have been legitimately turned into Hollywood garden statuary. He took a copy of the Vincent Price photograph to Jonathan Rowan, the town carver of Klawock, where the Tlingit of Tuxecan had moved. Rowan confirmed that the totem pole resembled other Tlingit poles in the Klawock-Tuxecan region; the finned sea creature of the middle crest was a killer whale. Comparing historical photographs of Prince of Wales Island with the Price image, and with a news photograph of Barrymore standing by the totem pole at Bella Vista, Rowan and Langdon concluded that a pole that had once stood on the beach at Tuxecan matched the one that had shown up in Beverly Hills.

Langdon began giving public lectures about the totem pole’s strange migration. In his presentations, he dismantled several myths—as colorful as Price’s story was, it wasn’t possible that “Mom and Dad” had been buried together in the pole, because double interment was not the Tlingit way. Langdon strongly suspected that the pole had been taken, not bought: selling totem poles was forbidden (though it did happen occasionally), and by the time of Barrymore’s Alaska voyages Tuxecan hadn’t been occupied for decades.

Alaska has always been vulnerable to the covetous impulses of strangers. In 1899, the railroad baron Edward Harriman organized an expedition that sailed from Seattle with more than a hundred people aboard. On the way back, the travellers stopped at Cape Fox, near Ketchikan, and found what they assumed was a ghost town. The clan that spent winters there must have despaired upon returning home, the summer harvest secured, to find themselves stripped of their possessions. Thousands of Cape Fox items were distributed to museums across the United States. One totem pole went to Harvard’s Peabody Museum, one to the Bronx Zoo, and one to Cornell; other objects went to the Smithsonian, the Field Museum, and the American Museum of Natural History.

Over time, Americans began to reconsider the way that indigenous peoples had been treated. In 1990, Congress passed the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, which required museums and other institutions to inventory their collections and to return items of cultural patrimony if tribes asked for them back. Between 1990 and September, 2009, the Federal Register published notices related to the repatriation of 1,142,894 funerary objects, 38,671 human remains, 4,303 sacred objects, nine hundred and forty-eight “objects of cultural patrimony,” and eight hundred and twenty-two objects of “sacred and cultural patrimony.”

In 1994, a National Park Service employee at Glacier Bay wrote a memo explaining the urgency of such missions, citing the case of a Tlingit elder’s complaints about a missing house screen: “The screen is to him like the Constitution is to me, he said. It lays a base to his people’s claim to be allowed to use Glacier Bay park as they did for the many years before it became a park. The screen is thus a ‘document’ stating his people’s right to hunt and fish.”

A few years ago, Langdon travelled to Hawaii for a conference. On behalf of Tlingit leaders, he visited the Honolulu Museum of Art, presented his evidence, and made a positive identification of the Tuxecan totem pole—the first step toward getting it returned to Alaska. As Stephan Jost, the museum’s director, told me, it was “the least gray case I’ve ever seen.”

On a sunny afternoon in early February, Jost, a tanned ex-Vermonter in a subtle aloha shirt, escorted me to the basement of the museum. At the end of a fluorescent-lit corridor that was lined with mannequin torsos, he opened a locked door by entering a code on a keypad. We walked into a climate-controlled room filled with towering sculptures and paintings on racks. At the end of the room, along a cinder-block wall, stood the bottom third of the totem pole.

“Stella, just . . . you know . . . come on, man.”

The pole had arrived at the museum in three sections, marked by the tortures of attempted repair: bolts, screws, and cement infill, used to patch cracks in the wood. The bird’s nose was loose; the human’s arm was broken, and woodpeckers had gouged out an eye. A pair of vertical steel rods—which had presumably been installed at one of the Beverly Hills locations, for reinforcement—extended past the wolf-bear’s shoulders, like a rungless ladder.

Yet the pole had a bedraggled dignity. The wood, though scarred and desiccated, was surprisingly smooth to the touch. The figures were holding on to their last traces of paint. You have to see a totem pole up close to appreciate the contrast between its thousands of tiny adze marks and its monolithic scale. The pole’s girth made it too big to be fully embraced. The wolf-bear would have stood eight feet tall had it not been decapitated. Because the pole had been sawed apart in all the wrong places—not that there were any right places—the wolf-bear’s head was now attached to the bottom of the killer-whale crest. The head of the human was now the perch of the bird. The other two crests lay in a corner, on acid-free foam. Face up, the carved creatures seemed to gaze, as if mesmerized, at the pipes running across the ceiling.

Sitting guard was an art work from the nineteen-seventies, by Duane Hanson, titled “Secretary.” It was an alarmingly realistic and life-size sculpture of a woman in an office chair, head bowed, writing on a steno pad, as though prepared to document the presence of anyone who approached.

In southeastern Alaska, winter breeds patient citizens. A ferry may sail halfway across the sound and be turned back by chop. Float planes may fly or they may not. Ours did. One morning in late January, the de Havilland Canada DHC-2 Beaver glided off the Tongass Narrows, out of Ketchikan, and flew over the kind of Alaskan landscape seen in the movies: unpeopled expanses of evergreen forest and the sea, laced with ice and fog. Thirty minutes later, the pilot set the plane down as gently as a china cup, and we bobbed over to a dock at the town of Craig.

Langdon and I met at a small fishing lodge on Shelter Cove. He was standing at the window of the common room, watching herons and seagulls perform their morning sorties. The cove was prone to curtain-drops of blinding fog—Langdon remembered piloting a skiff and suddenly being engulfed in white. On this morning, the sun was shining for the first time in three weeks.

Langdon was born in Colorado but grew up in Alaska. People have told him that he resembles Ernest Hemingway: square jaw, white beard, a naturalness with outerwear. He had on jeans and a Columbia jacket over layers; his rubber boots were dull with legitimacy. He was dressed for the water because he was headed out to watch a Tlingit research subject hunt sea otter. Langdon, who is sixty-six, retired from his university job last June, but he does research full time. Recently, he has been investigating the distribution of commercial-fishing permits in Alaska—Tlingits often have a hard time making a living from their ancestral waters.

On a table by the window, he unfolded an enormous U.S. Forest Service map. Prince of Wales Island is mostly forest, and its second-largest town is Klawock—with about seven hundred inhabitants. (Craig, pop. 1,200, is eight miles south.) “We’re here, and we’re going here,” Langdon said, talking about Tuxecan. He ran a finger all the way up the island’s western coast, to a place that is no longer named on maps.

Several days later, we met a Tlingit named Mike Douville at the dock in Craig just after dawn. Douville is a commercial fisherman in his mid-sixties, with graying hair and a walrusy mustache. He wore aviator glasses that magnified his brown eyes. His great-grandfather was a chief at Tuxecan. Douville is interested in ancestry and had agreed to take us to the old village site by boat.

We boarded an aluminum skiff that Douville had retrofitted as a speedboat, with two bucket seats and a windshield. The temperature was in the thirties. We each had on a Mustang survival suit: an insulated one-piece that can save your life if you happen to fall into a frigid ocean. Douville wore his suit partially zipped, revealing plaid flannel underneath. He had on rubber boots and a baseball cap, and carried a canvas backpack containing a baggie of sandwiches made with homemade salmon spread.

Prince of Wales is flanked by hundreds, if not thousands, of small islands, with names like Rosary, Sombrero, Wadleigh, and Owl. The waterways connecting them have names like Shinaku Inlet and Tonowek Bay. Douville piloted out, with me sitting beside him and Langdon just behind us, sitting on an overturned plastic bucket. At high speeds, the boat’s momentum and tilt forced him to hold tight to the backs of our seats by his fingertips—in one area of intense chop, I looked back to see him grimly taking continual facefuls of spray, as if someone offstage were sloshing him with prank buckets of water. The engine noise drowned out almost everything but the yipping bounce of Douville’s spring-mounted pilot seat—in rough water it sounded like puppies barking—but the water glassed out as we entered a stretch known locally as the Eleven-Mile Shore. It wasn’t hard to imagine the journey being made by canoe. At one point, Douville stopped by a wooded shoreline where a shaman was buried and dropped tobacco into the water, as an offering. We soon saw three killer whales wheeling through the waves. Sea otters were doing the backstroke, their knobby heads bobbing like buoys. We never saw another human, save a lone figure in a johnboat, sputtering north in the distance as the sun came out.

After an hour and a half, Douville steered us into a heavily forested cove. We were approaching Tuxecan. The terrain looked devoid of any past human habitation, and, for a moment, he and Langdon debated whether they had the right place. We glided up to a gravel beach, waded ashore, climbed a short embankment, and entered a forest. The ground was spongy with wet earth and bright-green moss, and the air smelled of solitude and pine.

Very little of the old village remained. As we tramped around, Tuxecan showed itself only as half-buried scraps of rusted metal (“probably associated with a stove,” Langdon said) and overgrown furrows (“potato garden”). Douville spotted a log, about eighteen feet long, lying perpendicular to the shoreline. Furred with moss, it had become ensnared by tree roots, like Gulliver in ropes. “That might be a totem pole,” Langdon said, doubtfully. “This stuff is rotted so far through, the likelihood of seeing a crest form is extremely low.” The last time Langdon had visited the site, a decade earlier, he could make out the shapes of houses, but the rapacious climate of southeastern Alaska spares nothing made of wood.

Douville wandered off alone and soon hollered, “Come look at this!” Langdon found him crouched over a squared-off length of red cedar pulled from the brush. Red cedar doesn’t grow north of the fifty-seventh parallel, and Tuxecan was on the Arctic side of that boundary—logs usually had to be towed in, by canoe, from more southerly parts of the island. Douville had found what appeared to be a house beam. “You can still see the adze marks!” he kept saying.

Standing, he dusted off his hands, and said, “I’m glad there’s something left.”

Late one January afternoon, Langdon went to Klawock and met with the new Tlingit tribal administrator, Lawrence Armour, who is from the Raven Dog Salmon clan. He is thirty-two, with black hair and a pleasant face, and tattoos from his twelve years in the Navy. They spoke in Armour’s office as dusk approached; Langdon sat across from him, facing a window overlooking the docked trawlers and seine boats in the town harbor. A stubby lighthouse metronomically blinked red. Armour and Langdon had been working on a sensitive issue involving a native gravesite, but the conversation turned to Armour’s job, which he accepted last summer, partly in an attempt to reconnect with his heritage. “To this day, I don’t even know my Tlingit name,” he told Langdon. “My great-grandmother was the last person that knew it.”

Armour is helping to establish ceremony protocols for handling the return of tribal artifacts and related objects. Thousands of Tlingit items, some of them sacred, continue to circulate in private collections. Between May, 2006, and November, 2014, Sotheby’s alone sold more than five million dollars’ worth of works described as Tlingit or “probably Tlingit.” In recent auctions, successful sales have included an important carved-wood clan hat ($365,000), a wooden headdress ($185,000), a wooden comb ($125,000), a ceremonial dance blanket ($43,750), and a copper dagger ($23,750). The various provenances mentioned a range of recognizable institutions and private players in the trade in Northwest Coast artifacts: the Fowler Museum, the Heye Foundation, the collections of the late Andy Warhol and Ralph Altman.

Armour slid a printed e-mail across his desk to Langdon and said, “They let me know they’re ready to repatriate.”

The notice, from the Honolulu Museum of Art, had been sent the previous day. The Tuxecan totem pole was coming home. Months of planning lay ahead, involving the logistics of transporting the pole and memorializing its arrival. Among other things, the Tlingit of Klawock had to decide whether to store the pole or put it on display. In Alaska, tribal bureaucracy is complex and glacial. Langdon congratulated Armour and offered to videotape the totem pole’s homecoming. Then he walked over to the harbor, to watch his research subject skin sea otters by lamplight.

The next morning, Langdon found Jonathan Rowan, the town carver, working in Klawock’s new carving shed. Armour was there, too—Rowan is his uncle. Sitting on a low stool, between two space heaters, Rowan was custom-carving a contemporary totem pole for a shipbuilding company in Ketchikan: the log, which was almost finished, included images of a sea lion and an ant. The shed was a long, broad room with a peaked roof and windows; an alcove held log slicks, axes, hammers, saws, and adzes, some of them very old, with intricately carved handles. A Klawock city official, a Haida who took up carving and “Indian dancing” after he gave up drinking, sat working on a small frontlet, which he planned to trade for ceremonial leggings. The place smelled like a giant hope chest, but Rowan, who has been carving since he was six, has lost his nose for cedar.

Rowan is in the Eagle Shank’weidi Wolf clan. A beefy, genial ex-marine in his early fifties, he drives a vintage Ford pickup pasted with bumper stickers (“Vegetarian: Old Indian Word for Piss Poor Hunter”) and teaches native arts in the public schools. In the late nineteen-thirties, as part of a totem-preservation project, the Civilian Conservation Corps carved replicas of Tuxecan’s poles and erected them in Totem Park, on a grassy slope above Klawock’s harbor. When those poles began decomposing, the town commissioned replicas of the replicas—Rowan carved twenty of the twenty-one poles currently in the park. He says, “The carving tradition was almost lost. We can’t lose it again.”

The winds of southeastern Alaska torque shoreline tree trunks into “big twisty things that you can’t really use,” Rowan told me. So one day he will visit a valley “where the winds ain’t bad” and look for the perfect red cedar to carve into a replica of the pole that travelled to California and Hawaii. A diameter of about thirty-two inches would be ideal, along with forty or so feet of bare trunk, or “clear.” Rowan is capable of dropping a tree himself, but he will have a professional cut this one. Once the log dries, he will strip the bark and the sapwood, hollow out the back, and pencil his plan directly onto the pulp. Following the original pole’s design, he will tease from the rough a bird atop a human holding a killer whale, atop a wolf-bear. Then he’ll paint it. Carvers no longer use natural pigments; in 2002, when a Coast Guard unit on Kodiak Island sought to restore a weathered pole, the Totem Heritage Center, in Ketchikan, advised using flat latex house paint from Ace Hardware, in colors including Spicy Curry, Blue Hills, and Black Magic.

Rowan suspects that the totem pole en route from Hawaii belonged to one of the forty clans on the Eagle/Wolf side of Tlingit society. It likely memorialized the dead wife of a leader. “We don’t know for certain what it means, and we may never know,” Rowan said one afternoon, as cedar curled off the blade of his knife. “But we know it’s our work. It’s our people.” 

*An earlier version of this article stated that Costello was Barrymore’s second wife.