STEVEN MICHAAN
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early appreciation of Native North American
art and culture.
As a far as auction houses, I’ve mainly dealt
with Christie’s and Sotheby’s, but one of my
most memorable collecting moments—and
not coincidentally one of the most important
pieces in my collection—involved a Tlingit war
helmet, which came up in 2008 at Fairfield
Auction, a small auction company located in
Monroe, Connecticut. At the time my resources
were limited, but when the war helmet came to
auction after first being listed on eBay, I knew
I had to have it, whatever the cost. Somehow I
would figure out how to pay for it—and I did.
It was hotly contested at auction—
in fact, it set
the record for a work of Native American art at
auction at the time—but mine ultimately was the
successful bid, and to this day this war helmet
may be my greatest triumph as a collector.
War helmets of this kind are very rare and
predate European contact with the peoples of the
Northwest Coast. Only about ninety are known
to exist, with the majority in museums and only
a handful in private collections. This example
dates back to the mid eighteenth century and was
likely used in a well-known conflict that took
place around 1804 that is now referred to as
the Battle of Sitka, in which the Tlingit peoples
resisted a Russian colonial assault (see Tribal Art
magazine, spring 2006, p. 184). While the war
helmet may not be the most sculpturally refined
of all my pieces—as compared to other objects
in my collection like the Tsimshian chief’s club,
the Tlingit atlatl, or the Quatsino otter bowl—
its significance to me lies in its great rarity and
important place in Tlingit history.
T.A.M.: You produced a lavish three-volume
book that documents most of the collection.
That must have been a remarkably timeconsuming
and expensive project. Why did you
create it?
S.M.: I had previously self-published a book
featuring my fish decoy collection, which is
titled American Fish Decoy and was released
in 2005, so I had some experience doing this.
With my tribal arts collection nearly completed,
I wanted to do the same for it. It was an
opportunity to share these pieces with the
community of collectors, and I wanted to have