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Plunderer or passionate collector, he lived for the University of Alaska Museum
Otto Geist's presence lingers like a phantom throughout the University of Alaska Museum. You must know where to look for him, though. Start with the mounted brown bear towering 8 feet, 9 inches over the lobby. Its broad face wears an expression that is dignified, determined, maybe a little roguish. Definitely Otto-like.
Then stroll through the exhibits. They display some of the prized objects from the Geist collection, a trove of Native artifacts he gathered-or, as some believe, stole-from the late 1920s until his death. A seal-gut parka as delicate as parchment. A Yupik child's wooden top. The exquisite, 2,000-year-old ivory figure known as the Okvik Madonna.
Geist haunts the basement, too. "You open a drawer and there's stuff that Otto gave us," said Angela Linn, manager of the ethnology and history collections. "Whether he was a packrat or whether it was an obsession, he was just a collectingophilc."
For decades, Geist was the museum at the Alaska Agricultural College and School of Mines (now the University of Alaska Fairbanks). His handwritten catalog contains pages that list harpoon heads, toys, tools, carvings, parkas and household objects he gathered during nine expeditions to St. Lawrence Island. The archeology collection alone holds between 300,000 and 400,000 artifacts that Geist excavated or bought. The exact number remains uncertain because cataloging continues as time and money allow, said archaeology collections manager James Whitney.
The St. Lawrence Island objects are the museum's "crown jewels," according to ethnology and history curator Molly Lee. But Geist also cataloged such oddities as two Alaska crab apples preserved in formaldehyde, bottled water from the Dead Sea, a miner's wheelbarrow, an old man's comb, a paisley scarf, a light bulb. In the years before finding a permanent home, the original collection rather resembled a Ripley's "Believe It or Not" exhibit, with its albino moose, two-headed caribou calf, and the gigantic brown bear now known as Otto.
Trying to understand Geist's legacy in Alaska is rather like excavating disturbed ground. Sift through his extensive papers, thousands of photographs and numerous accounts of his life, and questions emerge: Was he a glorified looter or a self-taught archeologist and paleontologist whose curiosity outstripped his education?...