The Lincoln Street Kayak
& Canoe Museum
The Lincoln Street Kayak and Canoe Museum (LSKCM) is dedicated to presenting a diverse variety of indigenous small watercraft forms in a contextual and educational setting. Each form represented here reflects centuries or millennia of development influenced by cultural tradition, environment, external pressures, resources, function, practicality, and aesthetics. Despite their broad variation in shape, construction and use, each vessel is a proven design that served the designer/builder/user's needs, aiding them successfully in hunting, fishing, migrating, trading, and for general navigation. Perhaps no single object created by genus Homo better represents our ancestors' ingenuity, survival instinct, and desire for exploration than the canoe. Today, the canoe remains a powerful symbol and metaphor for individualism and adventure and is among the few objects aiding human transportation that is still created by hand in a non-mass-production context.
The bulk of the LSKCM's watercraft collection is made of full-sized functional replicas of traditional Arctic hunting kayaks. Harvey Golden built these replicas in order to compliment his museum studies with an element of experimental research. These vessels are the largest and most complete assembly of pan-arctic kayak forms in the world. Many of the kayaks in the LSKCM can be seen under-construction and in-action at Traditional Kayaks.com.
Other full-sized craft in the collection include an Algonquin birch-bark canoe, a Wu-Hu tub boat from Nanking Province, and a double outrigger dugout canoe from the Philippines--all original craft. A functional Fijian outrigger canoe replica, a Kutenai canoe replica, and two coracles are also in the collections. Over thirty models--both originals and replicas--round out the collection with examples from all over the world.
