Aldona Jonaitis

Aldona Jonaitis (born 1948) is an American art historian, author, and director emerita of the University of Alaska Museum of the North. She has written several books focussing on Indigenous Northwest Coast art.

A professor at Stony Brook University in the 1970s and 1980s, she was hired to work as the vice president for public programs at the American Museum of Natural History in 1989. While there, she produced the 1991 exhibition Chiefly Feasts, a display on potlaches as they have been celebrated by the Kwakwakaʼwakw people. She moved to Alaska in 1993 after being hired by the University of Alaska Museum of the North to work as their director and the associated University of Alaska, Fairbanks, to teach anthropology classes. Upon her initial retirement from the museum in 2009, the university made her a director emerita. She came back in 2012 to work as interim director, before retiring again in 2015. Jonaitis has received an Governor's Awards for the Humanities in 2015 for her work in Alaska, and a Curators Committee Award for Excellence by the American Alliance of Museums for her work curating Chiefly Feasts.

As an author, her books include Art of the Northern Tlingit (1986), From the Land of the Totem Poles (1988), The Yuquot Whalers' Shrine (1999), The Totem Pole: An Intercultural History.(2010, with Aaron Glass) and Discovering Totem Poles (2012). She has also edited several books, including Chiefly Feasts (1991), Looking North (1998), and Unsettling Native Art Histories on the Northwest Coast (2020).

Early life and education Aldona Claire Jonaitis was born on November 27, 1948, in Flushing, Queens, to parents Thomas and Demie Jonaitis, both teachers. Jonaitis became interested in Northwest Coast art as a child, after visiting museums such as the American Museum of Natural History with her parents.

At the age of sixteen, Jonaitis enrolled in Stony Brook University, she graduated from Columbia with her PhD in 1977. Art of the Northern Tlingit is about the study of Tlingit art, beginning in the 1800s; in it, Jonaitis analyzes symbolism argues that Tlingit artwork is reflective of social and religious hierarchies. in a review for American Indian Quarterly, Wallace M. Olson was critical of what he perceived to be Jonaitis's reliance on sources and observers who were no fluent in the Tlingit language. He noted that the bibliography revealed only one Tlingit name; all others were non-Tlingit. Art historian Victoria Wyatt was critical of how she said Jonaitis had "based her primary ethnographic information heavily on the limited extant sources"; Jonaitis's eight-chapter book From the Land of Totem Poles was published by the AMNH and the University of Washington Press. A follow up to Objects of Bright Pride by Allen Wardwell, It contained a history of the AMNH itself, an illustrated catalogue of the museum's collection, The volume also contained substantial material on the career of anthropologist Franz Boas and nearly 100 color photographs of objects in the museum's collection, some of which had never been published before. The prose, interspersed with historical anecdotes, was described by Victoria Wyatt in African Arts as being in a "romantic" style which "reflects nineteenth century sensibilities" and "from the perspective of the institution [the AMNH]". She also criticized what she felt to be misleading statements or inaccuracies, given portions of Jonaitis's history on Alaskan governance and a claim that Alexander Andreyevich Baranov had paid a ransom to Tlingit people for Russian captives, when he had actually paid that ransom to an English captain, as examples. Wyatt also stated that she believed the book did not provide enough concrete dates of events for the reader to properly understand them. In a review published in the Telegraph-Journal, George Stanley described From the Land of Totem Poles as "interesting" and "beautiful", but said he ended up "wondering if the author really grasped the cultural significance and the inherent sadness of, say, a mortuary pole uprooted from its original site and re-erected within the alien walls of a museum". The exhibition itself, was about the celebration of potlatches by the Kwakwakaʼwakw. Jonaitis continued to work at the UAMN and, in 1998, the museum published Looking North: Art from the University of Alaska Museum, an anthology of essays on the museum's collection edited by Jonaitis. The next year, University of Washington Press released The Yuquot Whalers' Shrine, a book the Yuquot Whalers' Shrine, its acquisition by Boas and Hunt, the purchase by the AMNH, and the controversies over that acquisition and the question of reparation.

In 2002, she was a Stanford University distinguished professor of American art history. and was shortlisted for the 2011 Roderick Haig-Brown Regional Prize.

In 2012,

In 2015, Jonaitis received a Governor's Awards for the Humanities.

Unsettling Native Art Histories, an art history book on the Northwest Coast art edited by Jonaitis and Kathryn Bunn-Marcuse, was released in 2020.

Personal life Jonaitis married Herman Lebovics in July, 1986.

With Robert Davidson and Marianne Jones

With Aaron Glass.

As editor

Edited with Kathryn Bunn-Marcuse.