Smithsonian at the Poles: Contributions to International Polar

“Smithsonian at the Poles”:
A 150-Year Venture
The Smithsonian Institution has a strong legacy of International Polar
Year (IPY) activities dating to the fi rst IPY in 1882–1883. The fi rst
two Smithsonian Secretaries, Joseph Henry (1846–1878) and Spencer
F. Baird (1878–1887), were strong proponents of the advancement of
science in the polar regions and of the disciplines that eventually formed the core
of the program for that fi rst IPY: meteorology, astronomy, geology, and natural
history, as well as studies of the polar residents and their cultures.
By the fi rst IPY, the Smithsonian had forged partnerships with federal agencies,
private organizations, and individual explorers active in polar regions (Baird,
1885a; 1885b). For instance, the Signal Offi ce of the then U.S. War Department
was in charge of preparations for U.S. IPY missions to Barrow (1881–1883) and
Lady Franklin Bay (1881–1884), supported by expedition scientists whom the
Smithsonian helped to select and train. The Institution also offered its facilities
and libraries, and the expertise of its curators to the returning IPY parties and
was granted most of the American IPY-1 natural science and ethnological collections,
expedition photographs, and personal memorabilia returning from the
North. As a result, the Smithsonian’s early natural history collections from Barrow,
Alaska, are among the most comprehensive in the world, as are those from
Labrador, accessioned in 1884. The Smithsonian published two monographs as
contributions to its Annual Reports of the Bureau of Ethnology series and many
shorter papers that described the collections accessioned from the IPY missions
to Alaska and Canada (Murdoch, 1892; Turner, 1894; Fitzhugh, 1988; Loring,
2001). These Smithsonian holdings are now a source of knowledge to scientists
and cultural information to indigenous communities, who view the early IPY
collections as their prime heritage resource.
The Smithsonian’s involvement in the second International Polar Year 1932–
1933 and in the International Geophysical Year (IGY) 1957–1958 (originally
planned as the “third IPY”) was modest, although the National Air and Space