A hand-carved, 26-foot Tlingit dugout canoe, known as the Raven Canoe, will be ceremonially launched into the Potomac River this Thursday morning, June 19, in preparation for its installation in the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History’s soon-to-be-opened Ocean Hall. The canoe is a gift from the Tlingit Nation―a Native American group from Southeast Alaska.

Tlingit Elder Clarence Jackson will lead a formal blessing and naming ceremony after the canoe is launched. The canoe’s master carver, Douglas Chilton, and eight paddlers will be dressed in ceremonial regalia and will make a stately procession down the river before returning to the boat landing and gifting the canoe to the Smithsonian.

Painted black with a carved raven figurehead, the canoe celebrates the enduring relationship between Native Alaskans of the Northwest Coast and the bounty of the sea. In its beak, the raven figurehead holds a copper disk that represents the sun—in Tlingit folklore, it was Raven that stole sunlight and brought it to the world for human beings.

The public will first see the Raven Canoe on Sept. 27 when the museum’s Ocean Hall opens. The canoe will be suspended from the ceiling alongside a life-size model of an endangered northern right whale.

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