Museums - Alaska Heritage Museum at Wells Fargo

Founded in 1968, the Alaska Heritage Museum’s collection of Alaska Native artifacts is one of the most impressive displays in the Anchorage area. The collection contains a wide range of traditional and contemporary Alaska Native artifacts, including household utensils, articles of clothing, and hunting weapons. The basket collection is especially strong and an extensive collection of contemporary ivory carvings is also on view.
The museum displays over 900 artifacts from a spectrum of Alaska Native cultures including Inupiq, Siberian Yup’ik, Cup’ik, Yup’ik, Alutiiq, Aleut, Athabaskan, Tlingit, and Haida. A collection of Okvik figures and Haida argillite carvings are a special feature of the display.
The objects in the Alaska Heritage Museum were acquired by the National Bank of Alaska under the direction of the Rasmuson family, who owned the bank for three generations. Beginning in the mid 1960s, Elmer Rasmuson and his son, Edward, oversaw the acquisition of the collection. The entirety was sold in a bank merger with Wells Fargo in 2000. The collection is presently displayed in a Wells Fargo branch, which also houses the museum’s reference library of some 2,500 volumes.