Not Just a Pretty Face: Dolls and Human Figurines in Alaska Native Cultures

Not Just a Pretty Face Dolls and Human Figurines in Alaska Native Cultures second edition Edited by Molly Lee Not Jus...

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Not Just a Pretty Face Dolls and Human Figurines in Alaska Native Cultures second edition

Edited by Molly Lee

Not Just a Pretty Face

Not Just a Pretty Face Dolls and Human Figurines in Alaska Native Cultures

second edition

Edited by

Molly C. Lee

with contributions by Angela J. Linn Chase Hensel James H. Barker

University of Alaska Press Fairbanks

© 2006 University of Alaska Press University of Alaska Press PO Box 756240 Fairbanks, Alaska 99775-6240 www.uaf.edu/uapress First edition published 1999 by the University of Alaska Museum. This publication was printed on paper that meets the minimum requirements for ANSI/NISO Z39.48–1992 (Permanence of Paper). Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Not just a pretty face : dolls and human ﬁgurines in Alaska native cultures / edited by Molly C. Lee ; with contributions by Angela J. Linn, Chase Hensel.—2nd ed. p. cm. ISBN-13: 978-1-889963-85-3 (pbk. : alk. paper) ISBN-10: 1-889963-85-2 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Eskimo dolls—Alaska—Exhibitions. 2. Inuit dolls—Alaska—Exhibitions. 3. Indian dolls—Alaska— Exhibitions. 4. Figurines—Alaska—Exhibitions. 5. Small sculpture—Alaska—Exhibitions. 6. Dollmaking—Alaska—Exhibitions. 7. University of Alaska Museum—Exhibitions. I. Lee, Molly. II. Linn, Angela J. III. Hensel, Chase. E99.E7N69 2006 2005032846

All studio photographs are by Barry J. McWayne unless otherwise noted. All measurements of museum objects are in centimeters (cm), length x width x height. Front cover image: Statue of Liberty doll by Rosalie Paniyak. Photographer James H. Barker. Back cover images: (Right) walrus-ivory carving from the site of Nukleet on Norton Sound; UAM 0470-0014. (Left) Tlingit shaman figure, ca. 1888. Courtesy Sheldon Jackson Museum, Sitka, cat. no. I.A.34. Cover design: Dixon J. Jones, Rasmuson Library Graphics. Printed in China

Contents Preface 1

Intimates and Efﬁgies Dolls and Human Figurines in Alaska Native Cultures Angela J. Linn and Molly Lee

2

vii

1

Playing for Real Scholarly Perspectives on Alaska Native Play and Ritual 41 Angela J. Linn

3

Everything Old Is New Again Interviewing Alaska Native Doll Makers Chase Hensel

4

47

Rosalie Paniyak A Portrait Angela J. Linn and James H. Barker

59

References

65

Index

69

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I

n a village on the lower Yukon lived a man and his wife who had no children. After a long time the woman spoke to her husband one day and said, “I cannot understand why we have no children; can you?” To which the husband replied that he could not. She then told her husband to go on the tundra to a solitary tree that grew there and bring back a part of its trunk and make a doll from it. . . . When he returned [the husband] sat down and carved from the wood an image of a small boy, for which his wife made a couple of suits of clothing in which she dressed it. . . . The man then carved a set of toy dishes. . . . [His wife] then deposited the doll in the place of honor on the bench opposite the entrance, with the toy dishes full of food and water before it. When the couple had gone to bed that night and the room was very dark they heard several low whistling sounds. The woman shook her husband saying, “Do you hear that? It was the doll,” to which he agreed. They got up at once, and making a light, saw that the doll had eaten the food and drank the water and they could see its eyes move. The woman caught it up with delight and fondled and played with it for a long time. After this the doll lived for a very long time. When his foster parents died he was taken by other people, and so lived for many generations. Since his death, parents have been accustomed to make dolls for their children in imitation of the people who made the one of which I have told. Adapted from “The Origin of the Winds,” recorded by Edward W. Nelson between 1877 and 1881 on the lower Yukon.

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Preface Molly C. Lee

A young Aleut girl cradles a doll at the Jesse Lee Memorial Home, Unalaska, ca. 1889. Photographer unknown. Sheldon Jackson Papers (RG 23914-27, #885), Presbyterian Historical Society, Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), Philadelphia, PA.

N

ot Just a Pretty Face was written to accompany an exhibition by the same name. It was based on the research of Angela J. Linn, who carried out the project in partial fulfillment of her master of arts thesis requirements. In the field of Alaska Native art and material culture, there are numerous exhibition catalogs focusing on dolls. Such catalogs are generally devoted to dolls that were playthings for children and usually examine those of a single Alaska Native culture. By contrast, Not Just a Pretty Face considers the entire range of uses of dolls and human figures. For some Native Alaskans, a human figure could stand in for community members absent during an important feast. Others employed miniature likenesses of humans to promote the fertility of a barren woman. In earlier times, human figures were used to inflict harm on another person. Not Just a Pretty Face surveys these and other uses of dolls. The contributors make use of the ethnographic literature on Alaska Native peoples as well as the oral traditions gathered from a group of Alaska Native advisors who worked on the exhibition. This comprehensive survey of the human ﬁgure in Alaska Native cultures unites, in a single source, ethnographic

literature, twentieth-century oral histories, and photographic documentation of the doll-making process. The second edition includes a photo essay on Rosalie Paniyak, a Cup’ik doll maker from Chevak who is one of the most inﬂuential doll makers working in Alaska today. We would like to acknowledge the contributions of the team who advised us about the museum exhibit: Poldine Carlo, Martha Demientieff, Beckie Etukeok, Eva Heffle, Chase Hensel, Christopher Koonooka, Velma Koontz, Jonella Larson, Phyllis Morrow, Rebecca Petersen, and Glen Simpson. We also appreciate the doll makers who consented to be interviewed: Dora Buchea, Rosalie Bunyan-Serovy, Denise Hardesty, Eva Heffle, Walton Irrigoo, Alice Johnnie, Caroline Kava Penayah, Ruth Koweluk, Iva and Ken Lisbourne, Rosalie Paniyak, Jackie Schoppert, and Lillian Tetpon. We would also like to acknowledge the contributions of museum staff who helped with the exhibit, specifically Steve Bouta, Terry Dickey, and Wanda Chin, as well as the student assistants and volunteers whose hard work helped make the exhibit and catalog a success. Now as then, we remember their hard work with gratitude.

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Map 1. This map shows the origin of many dolls and ﬁgurines in the University of Alaska Museum collection and the home villages of many doll makers. The Alaska Native language map (right) shows the geographic distribution of Alaska’s indigenous peoples. Modiﬁed from the map “Native Peoples and Languages of Alaska” (1980). Courtesy Alaska Native Language Center.

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Siberian Yupik

Inupiaq

Aleut

Tlingit

Haida

Central Yup’ik

Athabascan

Alutiiq

Tsimshian

Eyak

Intimates and Effigies Dolls and Human Figurines in Alaska Native Cultures Angela J. Linn and Molly C. Lee

For more than a thousand years, Alaska Native people1 have fashioned human ﬁgurines out of stone, bone, ivory, rodent claws, trade cloth, and many other materials. Children played with such ﬁgurines—usually called dolls—but their other uses in both everyday and ceremonial life are less well known. In the ancient cultures of the Bering Strait region, palm-sized walrus ivory carvings of women holding babies were used to promote fertility. Along the lower Yukon River, Yup’ik Eskimo and Athabascan shamans hung human ﬁgurines made of driftwood in trees to foretell the location of game. In the Aleutian Islands, an ancient ivory hermaphrodite with tusks suggests the mediating role that shamans played between male and female spheres. Today, Alaska Native women have broken with the past by creating innovative examples that belie conventional “doll” aesthetics. Thus, the term doll, the only common English language collective word for human miniatures, is woefully inadequate to convey the widespread uses of human ﬁgurines in Alaska Native cultures.

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The collection of dolls and human miniatures from Alaska Native cultures at the University of Alaska Museum of the North 2 includes several thousand ﬁgures from Alaska’s prehistoric and early historic periods and is one of the largest and most representative public collections of historic and modern Alaska Native dolls in existence. All six ethnic groups in Alaska—the Inupiaq and Yup’ik Eskimos, the Aleuts and Alutiiqs, and the Athabascan and Northwest Coast Indians—are represented in the collection, although the Central Yup’ik and St. Lawrence Island Yupik collections of human ﬁgures are largest. This chapter3 describes the various purposes that dolls and human ﬁ gurines have served in Alaska Native cultures past and present. We have drawn on a wide variety of sources: published, archival, and oral history.4 Some human ﬁgurines were used by religious specialists such as shamans. While these practices were sometimes feared, this information is included in the hope that it will offer a more complete picture of life in earlier times.

The Human Figure in Alaska Native Cultures of the Past Our understanding of the roles of human ﬁgurines in prehistoric Alaskan cultures is incomplete, not only because of the unequal distribution of archaeological sites, but because of the uneven degree of preservation of the artifacts themselves. For example, one-piece dolls of ivory or wood found in an archaeological context may once have been dressed in skin clothing that rotted away in the ground. Also, while human ﬁgurines have been recovered from most areas now inhabited by Alaska Native groups, the relationship between the

ancient and present-day cultures is not always clear. Thus, even ethnographic analogy, the archaeologists’ court of last resort, is problematic here.

Bering Strait Region By far the largest number and oldest examples of human ﬁgurines from prehistoric Alaska have been excavated on and near St. Lawrence Island. Those from the Okvik period (200 BC to AD 100; also called Old Bering Sea I) are perhaps the best known. Female ﬁgurines

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Map 2. Important archaeological sites where dolls and human ﬁgurines were excavated.

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Figure 1. Old Bering Sea Figurines These two walrus ivory ﬁgurines were excavated on the Punuk Islands, southeast of St. Lawrence Island. They are about 2000 years old and of unknown use. The “Okvik Madonna” (right) holds a ﬁgure on her belly. It is probably a child or, perhaps, a bear cub. Both ﬁgures are attributed to the Okvik culture as determined by their decorative surfaces. Researchers are unsure whether these are tattoo designs, represent clothing, or perhaps are skeletal motifs like those found on Dorset culture ﬁgurines of the Canadian arctic. The Dorset period was contemporaneous with Okvik. (Left) 17 cm, UA71-009-0001; (right) 18 cm, UA4-1934-0607.

Figure 2. St. Lawrence Island Wooden Figures Whether these ﬁ gures are play dolls or human ﬁ gurines is unknown. Otto Geist mentions that similar ones were used as house guardians on St. Lawrence Island, but elders from the island have also suggested that they were toys for playing house. St. Lawrence Island Yupik. From left to right: 2.3 x 1 x 0.7, 11933-8426; 2.8 x 1.1 x 0.5, 1-1933-8416; 6.4 x 2.4 x 1.3, 1-19338408; 7.5 x 3 x 1.5, 1-1933-8403; 4.5 x 2 x 1.2, 1-1933-8406; 2.3 x 1 x 0.5, 1-1933-8436; 1.4 x 0.6 x 0.4, 1-1933-8440.

ranging from three to 20 centimeters tall predominate (Fig. 1). Stylistically, the heads are pointed ovals, and facial features consist of curved eyebrows, straight ridge-like noses, and small mouths (Ray 1961:14). Genitalia are often exaggerated. If arms or legs are present, they are generally either nubs or long and bent at the joints. Most Okvik ﬁgurines are engraved with diagonally oriented, deeply etched parallel lines; these may represent clothing, tattoos, or may be skeletal referents (Fair 1982). The purpose of the Okvik ﬁgurines is uncertain. They were possibly made as children’s toys, but their full breasts, distended abdomens, and pronounced genitalia suggest that they were used in fertility ceremonies (Rainey 1941:521). This is further suggested by their putatively skeletal motifs, which are generally associated with shamans (Taylor and Swinton 1967:33). Headless dolls, as well as detached doll heads, are frequently found in Okvik sites, which also suggests this association. The relationship of Okvik people to present-day residents of the same area is a matter of conjecture, but early twentieth-century St. Lawrence Islanders are reported to have broken dolls on the death of shamans or children (Ray 1977:10). Human ﬁgurines are also found in Old Bering Sea II5 sites from the same area. Dating from AD 100 to 300, these are usually more accurately depicted than

Intimates and Efﬁgies

the earlier Okvik examples. Changes in facial features include broad, ﬂat noses and slit-like eyes (Wardwell 1986:65–79). Punuk sites from the nearby Punuk Islands (AD 500 to 1200) yield ﬁgurines whose body style is similar to those of the Old Bering Sea cultures (Wardwell 1986:96–97), but the heads are broader and rounder (Giddings 1964:88). Round-headed dolls are also found in the early historical period from St. Lawrence Island and Alaska.

Thule Period ( AD 900 to 1700) Thule human ﬁgurines, unlike the preceding styles from the coast of Siberia and St. Lawrence Island, are found across the North American Arctic from the Bering Strait to Greenland. Thule sites are the earliest to

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Figure 3. Nukleet Figures Eighteen whole and fragmentary human ﬁgurines and related objects of wood or bark were found at the Nukleet site on Norton Sound. Reprinted from Giddings (1964, plate 32).

which present-day Eskimo populations can reliably be traced. Examples from the Thule sites, such as Nukleet, on Norton Sound, are abundant (Giddings 1964:89) (Fig. 3). Their purpose is unknown (Bandi 1969:154), although ethnographic analogy with the Eskimos of the historic period suggests that the ﬁgurines were used as charms, amulets, or children’s playthings. To summarize, the existence of miniature human ﬁgurines in the prehistoric Bering Strait suggests that

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they played an important, if undetermined, role in these cultures. The more widely spread and later Thule ﬁ nds from across the Arctic yield plentiful numbers of human sculptures, suggesting that they were also important to the more recent arrivals in Alaska. Furthermore, Thule ﬁgurines from Alaska to Greenland show more stylistic similarity with each other than they do with those from the more localized Bering Strait cultures that preceded them (Giddings 1964:91).

Chapter 1

Figure 4a (front) and b (back). Ivory Carving The function of this object is unknown. It is made from walrus ivory, has a hole drilled into the top of the head, and has a small human form carved on the back. There is no information to indicate whether it was excavated at Nukleet on Norton Sound or was a twentieth-century piece collected during the dig. 10 x 2.5 x 2, 0470-0014.

Human Figurines in Aleut and Alutiiq Prehistory Human ﬁgurines of wood and ivory have also been excavated in the Aleutian Islands, on the Alaska and Kenai peninsulas, and Kodiak Island. Because the Aleutian archaeological record is less complete than that of Bering Strait and St. Lawrence Island, these ﬁgurines are less well known. Laughlin and Marsh (1951) excavated the earliest known Aleutian humanoid from Chaluka Mound on Umnak Island, the oldest reported site in this vicinity.6 The ﬁgurine, which is at least three thousand years old, was made of ivory and is about twelve inches tall, with a thick trunk and neck, straight-hanging arms, and some kind of hat on the back of its head. The ﬁgurine had hung by a string inside the house where it was found; apparently, the head of the household prayed to it before going to sea (Laughlin and Marsh 1951:82). The ﬁgurine has no ethnographic parallel (Laughlin and Marsh 1951:75 ff; Ray 1981:24). One of the most common types of artifacts at Chaluka were “images of deities” of bone and ivory (Laughlin 1963:77–79).

Intimates and Efﬁgies

Figure 5. Aleut Harpoon Head This harpoon type was used in warfare and hunting. Made of bone, they are carved with human faces. The faces may represent helping spirits, who guarded the weapons and helped them in striking animals. Reprinted from Jochelson (1925, ﬁg. 83).

Two important human ﬁgurines were found on Amaknak Island. One known as the “Jowly Man” has arched eyebrows, a mouth represented by a slash, and a chin incised with lines that may be either a tattoo or a beard (beards were worn by Aleut shamans) (Black 1982:8). From this same site is a female ﬁgurine made of walrus ivory, wearing a tall, ritual hat and missing what appear to have been articulated arms (Black 1982:8–10). Waldemar Jochelson excavated amulets and charms in human form on Umnak Island in the eastern Aleutians. He reports that the rudely carved ﬁgurines of stone, volcanic tufa, and slate were used in divination (Jochelson 1925:95, ﬁg. 79ab). Jochelson found crudely executed carvings of human faces on bone weapon fragments on Umnak as well. Evidently, these were intended as guardians of the weapons, and their presence was thought to increase the accuracy of the hunter’s aim (Jochelson 1925:95) (Fig. 5). William H. Dall, who excavated in the Aleutians in the 1870s, also found a number of small-sized human efﬁgies made of wood and painted red. Some were found in association with wooden cylinders, which

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Figure 6. Miniature Ivory Carvings It is nearly impossible to determine the functions of many archaeological pieces. This large group of miniature ﬁ gures could have been used for any number of purposes. Some researchers have suggested that they were charms to be worn to promote fertility (many of the ﬁgures seem to be female and have distended bellies and pronounced breasts). Others think they may have been toys. They also could have had ceremonial uses, or perhaps they illustrated now-forgotten stories. Many of the ﬁgures have interesting “topknots” that resemble those

Figure 7. Prehistoric Ivory Carvings The ivory ﬁgure on the far left, collected near Nome, may be a charm or amulet. A small hole pierces the hollow where the clavicles would meet. This depression is known as the spirit access point, the place where a spirit would enter the object and endow the wearer with its protection. The ﬁgure would also be ritually fed through this hole. The second object, also of unknown purpose, was excavated at the Nukleet site on Norton Sound. It was made between AD 900 and 1700. The two headless ﬁgures may have belonged to a St. Lawrence Island shaman. The heads of a shamans’ ﬁgurines were broken off after his or her death. Both of these pieces are made of ivory and are from excavations on St. Lawrence Island. 9 x 3, UA76-277-0001; 15 x 3.5, UA67-080-0567; 12.5 x 7, 1-1931-0307; 6.5 x 2, 0223-2551.

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worn by Greenlandic Eskimo women. Some have hoods that look like the hoods on Canadian Inuit parkas (amautiks). Most of these ﬁgures date to the Thule period, which, in Alaska, lasted from approximately AD 900–1700. 1-1933-8330; 1-1926-0802; UA74-066-0011; 1-1935-8435; UA84-052-0006; 0198-1872; 1-1933-8338; 1-1933-8332; 1-1933-8331; 1-1933-8345; 1-19338339; 1-1933-8333; 1-1935-8772; 1-1935-8771; 1-1933-9240; 1-1933-9241; 1-1935-8770; UA79-053-0097; UA69-037-0010; UA66-002-0090; 1-1935-4986; 1-1935-4772; 1-1935-4983; 1-1935-4017.

suggested to him that they might have been part of a shaman’s rattle (Dall 1878:30). He also mentioned another roughly made ﬁgurine found in a cave near a mummy. The small humanoid had been deposited in a basket along with other artifacts. It lacked arms and legs and was covered with a sticky, resin-like substance, suggesting that it may once have been inserted into something such as a model baidarka of the type commonly found in collections of Aleutian material from the early historic period (Dall 1878:24). William H. Dall and Alphonse Pinart found broken parts of life-sized efﬁgies in a number of locations across the Aleutians—for example, in association with masks and other cultural and human remains on Unga Island. Their broken condition may indicate that these ﬁgurines were used in religious ceremonies (Dall 1878:30; Lantis 1947:19). At the time that Dall was in the Aleutians, his informants remembered that ﬁgurines had been used in earlier times during religious festivities held in December on several Aleutian Islands. Made of wood or grass-stuffed skin, the ﬁgurines were carried from island to island in ceremonies that appear to have been conﬁ ned to one gender or the other. During such festivities a spirit was thought to inhabit the life-sized efﬁgies, and anyone who looked directly at them was sure to die. Thus, participants wore large masks. To reduce eye contact with the efﬁgies, eye

holes were cut in the nostrils of the masks enabling participants to look down, but not directly ahead or upward (Dall 1878:4–5). Conﬁ rming Dall’s information and bridging the gap between the prehistoric and historic periods, informants of Father Ivan Veniaminov—ﬁ rst Christian missionary in Alaska, who was in the Aleutians from 1825 to 1834—told him that in earlier times winter festivities had included reenactments of legendary feats of bravery. Two puppet-like ﬁgurines “of size” made out of grass, splendidly dressed and “operated from within by a man” were used in the reenactments. One, with a terrifying face and long beard, represented a giant, and the other, an even larger puppet, was the offspring of the devil. The performances also included actors, who feared and obeyed these larger-than-life ﬁgurines (Veniaminov 1984:199). Finally, a hermaphroditic ﬁgurine with tusks and breasts but lacking articulated genitals was found on Unalaska Island in the early 1900s by Nikolai Bolshanin (Black 1982:7). The ﬁgurine may represent the “Walrus Man,” who is not otherwise reported in the Aleutians but is known in the historic period throughout the Inupiaq area (Kaplan and Barsness 1986:154, ﬁg. 146). There have been numerous ﬁ nds of small wood, ivory, and bone anthropomorphic ﬁgurines in the Alutiiq region of Kodiak Island, northeast of the Aleutian

Figure 8. Alutiiq Kayak Model Like many kayak models, this example with three cockpits was collected as a souvenir of Alaska. However, there also is a longstanding Aleut and Alutiiq cultural tradition of using miniature

Intimates and Efﬁgies

boat models in ceremonial contexts. Collected around 1877; 62.2 cm, UA0823-0001.

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Islands. At the Karluk and Monashka Bay sites dating from about AD 1500 to 1750, archaeologists found forty-one carvings of three different types: those with detailed heads and bodies, those with heads and torsos but only facial detail, and miniature kayak men. The head and body carvings, which have exaggerated sexual organs, have been interpreted as fertility dolls (Fitzhugh and Crowell 1988:13, ﬁg. 165). The headand-torso carvings resemble the ﬁgurines that Kaj Birket-Smith described as shaman’s helpers (BirketSmith 1953:126 –128). The kayak men, found at all levels of the site, may have been connected to a whale cult. In 1871, Alphonse Pinart explored a cave on Kodiak Island that contained a small lake on which a miniature carving of a whale and a tiny man in a kayak ﬂoated. It is not widely known if the miniature kayak models, popular as souvenirs since the ninteenth century (Fig. 8) existed before European contact. If so, they probably had a ceremonial use connected with whale hunting (Donta 1993:293–295, 302–305). In her Cook Inlet and Prince William Sound excavations, Frederica de Laguna traced the development of Alutiiq culture from about 700 BC to the present. In three culture periods—Kachemak Bay I, II, and III—she uncovered a few human heads skillfully rendered in ivory. These and other ﬁ nds suggest an afﬁ liation with the Karluk ﬁ nds on Kodiak Island (Collins et al. 1973:14).

Athabascan and Northwest Coast Figurines in the Prehistoric Period In the Alaskan Interior, human ﬁgurines appear to be absent in the archaeological assemblages, which consist mainly of microblades and other stone tool types. Here again, the relationship between the prehistoric residents of this area and the present-day Athabascan Indian culture is uncertain, although descendants of late prehistoric inhabitants have been able to recon-

struct some aspects of the past by ethnographic and linguistic analogy (Clark 1981:128–129). An early historic period grave site on Yukon Island in Cook Inlet, an area now inhabited by the Tanaina Athabascans, yielded an ivory bust that had been buried along with splitting adzes and a slate knife. According to Tanaina informants in this region, grave goods consisted of objects that were either the most prized possessions of the deceased or those that were feared by his or her descendants. These same informants thought that the bust might be part of a shaman’s puppet, which would have represented the shaman’s guardian spirit (de Laguna 1934:114 and pl. 52). Evidence of human ﬁgurines in Northwest Coast cultures of the prehistoric era is sketchy. In the Yakutat Bay excavations, de Laguna recovered two ﬁgurines. One is a broken, charred bone carving of a man’s torso with a round face, large eyes, and a large mouth. The second, a charred wooden ﬁgurine of unspeciﬁed gender, is armless and nude, and the face is without features. The ﬁgurines’ broken state suggests that they may have been shamans’ ﬁgurines (de Laguna et al. 1964:172). Southeast of the AlaskaCanada border, bone pins with human heads have been recovered from sites dating between AD 500 and 1000. In the same area, anthropomorphic slate mirrors with well-deﬁ ned heads and bodies and abstract legs and arms have been excavated dating from between AD 1000 and historic contact. At the same site, bone pins with crude human faces were found, and these may have been used as fasteners for cedar bark capes (MacDonald 1983:103, 109). Finally, a human ﬁgurine carved of stone was found in a midden at Metlakatla in 1879, the only one of its type known for this area (MacDonald 1983:118–119). An early historic site on Admiralty Island yielded slate plaques incised with anthropomorphic designs, which an informant hesitantly identiﬁed as “scratchers” or amulets for pubescent girls (de Laguna 1956:204–205).

Historic Period The literature of the early historic 7 period is witness to the fascination that miniature human replicas held for foreign visitors (Phillips 1999:72–102). Early travelers—such as Lt. Lavrentii Zagoskin and Edward W. Nelson in the Central Yup’ik and Bering Strait Inupiaq areas, John Murdoch around Barrow, Father Ivan Veniaminov in the Aleutians, and the Krause brothers along the northern Northwest Coast—all

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mention dolls and ﬁgurines (Krause 1955; Michael 1967:229; Murdoch 1892:380–381; Nelson 1899:343; Veniaminov 1984:vii). These reports are uneven, but they suggest that in the early contact period Alaska Native groups used human ﬁgurines in three general ways: (1) miniatures were attached to the body or clothing of children and adults as charms or amulets, (2) larger ﬁgurines were made either for use in more

Chapter 1

Figure 9. Standing Inupiaq Figure This ﬁgure was found by the chief engineer of a ship on the beach at Nome during the gold rush of 1900. Whether it was a shaman’s doll or intended for a child is unknown. Children’s dolls were often armless to facilitate the changing of clothes. The dark burnt surface could suggest that it was used in ceremonies. Wooden objects were often burnt after their ritual power was used up. 19 x 5 x 3, UA94-009-0033.

Figure 10. Yup’ik Play Dolls Young girls in southwestern Alaska played with rag dolls just like girls everywhere. Once trade cloth was obtainable, a girl only had to wrap a bundle of cloth and dress it to have an instant playmate. This selection shows the integration of other trade materials and the dress style of the early 1920s. Left to right, Top row: (1) wooden head piece, 5 x 2 x 2, UA64-021-0871; (2) ivory-headed doll, 7.5 x 4 x 1, UA64-021-0094; (3) rag doll, 5.5 x 5 x 1, UA64-021-0868. Bottom row: (4) rag doll, 16 x 7.5 x 2, UA64-021-0872; (5) rag doll, 9.5 x 4 x 2, UA64-021-0192A; (6) rag doll, 8.5 x 3.5 x 1.5, UA64-021-0192B; (7) rock-faced doll, 23 x 10.5 x 5, UA64-064-0079; (8) rag doll, 11 x 9 x 2, UA64-0210869; (9) wooden-headed doll, 13.5 x 8 x 1.5, UA64-021-0189; (10) rag doll, 10.5 x 8 x 2, UA94-001-0091.

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formalized ritual and ceremony, or (3) children’s playthings.

Play Dolls in Alaska Native Cultures The information about play dolls within Alaska Native cultures is sporadic. As is so often the case in early museum collections, it is difﬁcult to distinguish dolls made for play from those made for ritual. According to Ray, there are some general principles that help in making the distinction: “In the nineteenth century,” she says, “dolls that had removable clothing, or that had a hard torso and legs of skin or cloth, were usually made as playthings, and the unclothed ﬁgurines of wood or ivory were usually amulets or shamans’ dolls” (1981:71).8 According to Ray, the soft-bodied doll with a skin body stuffed with fur or other materials was invented during the Nome gold rush of the 1890s and soon became the norm throughout Alaska Native cultures.

It is possible to distinguish Central Yup’ik human ﬁgurines from Inupiaq examples on the basis of facial features. Yup’ik ﬁgurines have a distinct brow line, shaped like two crescents joined at the center by the nose, whereas Inupiaq ﬁgurines lack this brow line and have more pronounced noses and tiny eyes that look as though they had been poked in by the tip of a pencil or pen. The mouths of Yup’ik ﬁgurines mirror the crescent shape of the brows, whereas the Inupiaq dolls have small, straight mouths. Overall, the features of the Inupiaq examples are more crudely carved (Nelson 1899:344) (Fig. 9).

Play Dolls of the Historic Period Central Yup’ik Play Dolls

Play dolls from the Central Yup’ik area were made of wood, bone, or ivory and measured from one to twelve inches in height or more (Fienup-Riordan 2003:40– 47). Male and female dolls were often distinguished

Figure 11. Doll Clothing and Sewing Tools Represented here are some of the miniature replicas of clothing worn by adults early in the twentieth century. There is also an Inupiaq sewing kit and housewife, which women used for storing sewing implements. Women used these tools for making the Yup’ik miniature gut parka and loon-skin parka, the

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St. Lawrence Island doll boots, and the Athabascan beaded mittens. Clockwise from top left: gut parka UA68-018-0009; loon-skin parka 0900-0086; housewife UA70-053-0046; sewing kit UA80-022-0055; mittens UA86-010-0005AB; boots 1084-0009AB.

Chapter 1

anatomically and can be told apart by the addition of ivory labrets for males and chin tattooing for females. The construction of the Central Yup’ik play dolls that Nelson collected from villages between St. Michael and the lower Kuskokwim River is fairly consistent.9 Most had round wooden, ivory or bone heads, ovoidshaped eyes and mouths, short necks, solid torsos, and arms that were formed but not separated from the body (Fig. 10). They also lacked legs (Nelson 1899:343; Ray 1981:99–102, 169, 171). The faces of female dolls were frequently tattooed. Other decoration, including hairdressings and nose- and earrings, was represented by hair and beads placed in the correct positions. Some even had bracelets and bead necklaces. The male dolls had labrets made from beads or bead pieces. Girls often had a number of play dolls of different sizes and several changes of clothes (Fig. 11). The latter were patterned after adult wear and included boots, mittens, and parkas made of lemming or mouse skin. Sometimes the dolls were provided with miniature household furnishings such as bedding and grass mats. Girls appear to have been solicitous of their small companions, lavishing attention on them as though they were alive (Nelson 1899:343–344). The centrality of play dolls in the lives of Central Yup’ik girls is evident from the role they assumed as the markers of seasons and life cycles. In the winter, dolls could not be taken outside for play unless they were covered up.10 If dolls were taken outside before the return of the geese, it was believed that summer would not come. (See Fienup-Riordan 2005:284 for a story illustrating the severity of the punishment for doing so.) The strictness of this prohibition can be inferred from the consequences that were thought to result from breaking the taboo: a story from Yukon River villages tells of a winter that did not turn into spring because one little girl had secretly played with her dolls—outside and uncovered—before the geese returned (Akaran 1975). Dolls also mediated the transition between childhood and adulthood in the Central Yup’ik region. According to the Moravian missionary John Kilbuck, a girl’s ﬁ rst menstruation was referred to as “putting away the dolls.” She was conﬁ ned for a period of time, during which her movements were restricted, and she was forbidden to engage in either childhood or adult activities. At the end of this isolation, she distributed her dolls to younger girls (Fienup-Riordan 1991:60).

details, and often lacking arms. Nelson criticized the workmanship of the St. Lawrence Island dolls, ﬁnding them “rudely made.” He felt that their makers displayed “little skill or artistic ability,” which he attributed to “their general lack of culture in this direction compared with the people of the adjacent American coast” (Nelson 1899:342). Whether he was referring to playthings or ﬁgurines used in other contexts is unknown. One type of play doll from this area is the so-called yoke doll, which may be simple but is by no means crude. Young girls were given the lower jaw of a walrus to dress or simply anthropomorphize by the addition of a happy face. Set on a girl’s shoulders and peeking out from beneath her parka hood, this jawbone was transformed into a baby in the normal carrying position (Figs. 12, 13). Earlier, such yoke dolls were sometimes carved from driftwood (Fig. 14, far left). Inupiaq Play Dolls

In the vicinity of Point Barrow, play dolls appear to have been less common than farther southwest around Bering Strait. John Murdoch, who was at Point Barrow from 1881 to 1883, collected several human ﬁgurines but none that were used for play. “[Dolls] do not appear to be popular with the little girls,” he wrote, and “I do not recollect ever seeing a child playing with a doll”

Figure 12. A Yoke Doll From a Walrus Mandible Young girls on St. Lawrence Island “dressed” a walrus jaw bone in scraps of cloth and placed the bone on the back of the neck to imitate their mothers who carried their babies this same way. Here, Velma Koontz of Savoonga demonstrates the technique.

St. Lawrence Island Yupik Play Dolls

St. Lawrence Island dolls of the early historic period were simple images of wood, without clothing or facial

Intimates and Efﬁgies

11

Athabascan Play Dolls

Among the Tanaina, little girls played with carved wooden dolls, dressing them in doll clothes and blankets made of arctic ground squirrel (Osgood 1937:124). Like the nearby Yupiit, Deg Hit’an (Ingalik) girls were subject to prohibitions involving play dolls.11 Wooden examples of the kinds found elsewhere were uncommon because the Deg Hit’an feared them, believing that when the dolls were put away for the night, evil spirits could enter them (Osgood 1940:390–391). Thus, little girls were sometimes forbidden to take their dolls to bed. These superstitions could be overcome, however, by summoning a shaman to banish any evil spirits lurking nearby (Osgood 1940:390–391). Instead, Deg Hit’an girls had dolls made out of materials such as a rabbit skin rolled and tied to resemble the human ﬁgure. Mothers made primitive dolls from pieces of moss or bundled grass. During an advisory committee meeting for the doll exhibit at the University of Alaska Museum in 1999, Poldine Carlo, who grew up in Nulato, said that girls used to pull up grass by the roots, bundle it, and let the roots hang down like hair, which they sometimes washed. Other girls made dolls for themselves out of tanned-skin cutouts sewn into human forms and stuffed with rabbit skin. Sometimes the faces were marked, and clothing modeled after real prototypes was added along with beads for nose- and earrings. Family members made dollsized furniture and birch bark food baskets (Osgood 1940:390–391). Figure 13. A Young Mother Carries Her Baby, Ca. 1926. The infant wears a unisuit, a garment unique to St. Lawrence Island. As a child, the mother may have played with a yoke doll that was carried in this same way. John Brooks Collection, acc. no. 68-32-1151, Archives, Alaska and Polar Regions Department, Rasmuson Library, University of Alaska Fairbanks.

(Murdoch 1892:380). This is puzzling given the considerable number of dolls that Nelson collected from the Bering Strait Inupiaq at about the same time. The most common type of ivory play doll in the Nelson collection has its arms hanging down at its sides (Nelson 1899:344). Unlike Murdoch, Nelson saw the dolls in use. He described one endearing incident in which two little girls on Sledge Island “placed their dolls standing in a semicircle before us upon the ﬂoor, while they sat quietly behind as though permitting their dolls to take a look at the strangers” (Nelson 1899:345).

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Aleut and Alutiiq Play Dolls

Early in the historic period the Alutiiq populations of Prince William Sound made wide use of dolls and human ﬁgurines: whether for ritual or play or both is unknown. According to Captain James Cook, who explored the sound in 1784, “[There were] a good many little images, four or ﬁ ve inches long, either of wood or stuffed, which were covered with a bit of fur and ornamented with pieces of small quill feathers, in imitation of their shelly [dentalia] beads, with hair ﬁ xed on their heads. Whether these might be mere toys or held in some veneration we could not determine” (quoted in de Laguna 1956:223). Northwest Coast Play Dolls

Among the northern Tlingit of Dry Bay and Yakutat, mothers made play dolls for their daughters, or obtained them already made from the Interior. The dolls had round stone heads, made either of beach

Chapter 1

Figure 14. Playing as Learning This photo illustrates many of the ways that play helps children to learn adult behavior. Girls learned mothering and sewing skills by using the yoke doll, the baby dolls, a birchbark baby carrier, and beaded baby belt. Boys learned hunting and kayaking skills by playing with the miniature bow and arrow and the kayak model with its attached hunting implements. These miniatures were made with as much detail and precision as were their full-sized counterparts. Left to right, back row: yoke doll,

St. Lawrence Island Yupik, 29 x 21, 1-1927-0496; baby doll, St. Lawrence Island Yupik, maker: Miriam Kilowiyi, 31 cm, UA66023-0002; baby doll, St. Lawrence Island Yupik, 20 cm, UA64021-0194; baby carrier, Athabascan, 41 x 26, UA95-017-0015. Front row: model kayak, Yup’ik, 39.4 cm, UA70-028-0001AH; miniature bow and arrow, Canadian Inuit, 65.4 (bow), 40.6 (arrow), UA68-052-0008AB; baby belt, Athabascan, maker: JoAnn Beaver, 4.1 x 38.1, UA90-007-0011.

stone (de Laguna 1960:107) or from a powdery white marble obtained from the Interior, purportedly from a mountain near the headwaters of the Alsek River in Canada. The marble was easy to carve when fresh but hardened rapidly. The bodies were made of rags. Girls also had small wooden food dishes for their dolls, which were sometimes carved out of a species of fungus (Fomitopsis pinicola). One informant told de Laguna that little girls rocked the dolls to sleep as their mothers rocked babies and that her own father had made a toy canoe for her dolls, which she played with in a small, fenced-in wading pool on the Situk River (de Laguna 1972:515).

Like the Central Yupiit, the Nor thwest Coast Indians marked the boundary between childhood and adulthood by the ceremonial renunciation of play dolls. After a girl’s ﬁ rst menstruation, when she emerged from her requisite period of isolation, the girl’s family held a feast at which she gave away her dolls. In accordance with the Northwest Coast Indians’ emphasis on kinship and social relations, the recipients of the castoff dolls were rigidly proscribed. Only prepubescent female cousins on the girl ’s father’s side could receive them. The distribution was organized by the girl’s mother (de Laguna 1972:520). The latest date for the collection of the stone-headed

Intimates and Efﬁgies

13

Figure 15. Tlingit Doll

Figure 16.

Tlingit girls played with dolls that had soft bodies and heads carved from a soapstone-like marble. This doll wears clothing made of leather and has a head that was probably carved by the child’s father out of marble or other white stone. It was collected by George Emmons at Klukwan, ca. 1885. Courtesy of the Burke

Amulets and charms were worn by Alaska Natives to promote health and to ward off evil spirits. Often, so many were worn that special belts were made to accommodate them. This young girl is wearing a single charm around her neck while aboard the Revenue Marine Steamer Corwin in 1884. Reproduced from

Museum of Natural History and Culture, cat. no. 1526.

Healy (1889:13).

dolls appears to have been about 1885, when George T. Emmons collected one (Fig. 15). Their disappearance apparently coincided with the importation of china and wax dolls, which soon replaced them (de Laguna 1972:515).

amulet had a speciﬁc purpose (Ray 1977:17), people often wore many of them. Eskimos attached charms and amulets to their clothing or strung them on thongs worn around the neck or wrist (Fig. 16).13 One early visitor to the Mackenzie Delta reported that the women’s parkas “were frequently ornamented with festoons of carved ivory pendants” (Colecleugh 1876:8). The Danish sea captain Adrian Jacobsen, who collected in the Yup’ik area between 1881 and 1883, also remarked on the prevalence of charms and amulets in the village of Tununak, noting: “An unusual sight is the young girls, many of whom attach wooden ﬁgurines to their fur hoods” (Jacobsen 1977:176). According to Edward M. Weyer, on Little Diomede and St. Lawrence islands, men sported enough charms and amulets to warrant the wearing of amulet straps, which were worn bandolier style, diagonally over the chest and one shoulder (Weyer 1932:316).

Human Figurines in Ritual and Ceremony Charms and Amulets

Many of the small wood or ivory human ﬁgurines of Alaska Native origin found today in museums, antique shops, or private collections probably started out as personal charms or amulets. Rarely exceeding three to four inches in length, charms and amulets have been reported from the Northwest Coast and the Aleutians, although Yup’ik and Inupiaq Eskimos appear to have made the greatest use of them. Because each

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Chapter 1

Larger Human Figurines in Ritual and Ceremony

In addition to charms and amulets, Alaska Native groups made larger human ﬁgurines for ritual purposes and as play dolls for children. Without documentation, there are no absolutes for distinguishing a ceremonial ﬁgurine from a play doll. However, as already mentioned above, Dorothy Jean Ray observed that the material out of which the ﬁgurine is made is a strong indication of its purpose. Her research suggests that ﬁgurines made of wood were intended for ritual purposes (Fig. 17) and those made of ivory were usually children’s playthings (Ray 1977:10). This distinction serves as a good general rule, although there are many exceptions. In the case of excavations of historic period sites, another indicator in some localities is whether the doll’s head is attached to its body. Dolls with severed heads seem to have served ritual or ceremonial purposes. On St. Lawrence Island, where many headless bodies—and bodiless heads—have been recovered, the heads were broken off the dolls of children who died (Ray 1977:10). In the Inupiaq village of Shishmaref,

however, the heads of both children’s and shamans’ ﬁgurines were broken off at death (Jones 1982:4). No explanation for this practice is given. In the case of children, if the doll was a symbolic representation of its personhood, breaking off the head may have been thought to release the ﬁgurine’s—and therefore the child’s—spirit from its body so that it would be free to travel to the spirit world; in the case of a shamanic ﬁgurine, the ritual “killing” may have neutralized the ﬁgurine’s potential for evil (Fig. 18). St. Lawrence Island and Central Yup’ik Figurines Larger wood or ivory ﬁgurines were used for a variety of shamanic purposes in most Alaska Native cultures. On St. Lawrence Island, ﬁgurines of a different type were used to cure infertility. According to Otto William Geist, rather than carving a single ﬁgurine of a child as was common in the Central Yup’ik area, shamans carved mother-and-child ﬁgurines for this purpose (Geist n.d.). The lifelike wooden sculptures of a parent and child carved by the great St. Lawrence Island

Figure 17. Possible House Guardians Otto Geist reported seeing human ﬁgurines on St. Lawrence Island that were used as house guardians, to discourage the entrance of evil spirits. This practice was also documented by Karl H. Merck in 1791 on the Seward Peninsula. Many of the Native people of Siberia also use anthropomorphic guardians to protect their homes, and these ﬁgures were fed with the best food the family could afford to show their respect for

Intimates and Efﬁgies

the ﬁgure’s spirit and to nourish it for continued protection. The gouges around the mouths of these ﬁ gures suggest that they were ritually fed in the past. The objects here are from St. Lawrence Island. During the historic period, the islanders have maintained close connections with their Siberian relatives.15 x 4, 1-1929-NN; 18 x 7, 1-1935-7700; 6.4 x 3, 1-1935-8779; 15 x 3, 1-1935-8513; 15 x 4.3, 1-1935-2185; 15 x 3.6, 1-1926-1048.

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Figure 18. Ivory and Clay Heads On St. Lawrence Island, the heads of shamans’ dolls were often broken off upon his or her death. This practice also was common when children died. The reason for this practice is not known, but some think it was a way to prevent the helping spirit that had inhabited the doll from returning and working evil. Left to

right: ivory head from Hillside site, 7.8 x 1.7 x 1.2, 0223-2551; ivory head with tattooing, 4 x 3 x 3, 1-1926-0819; ivory head from Kukulik site, 6.4 x 4 x 3.4, 1-1931-0961; clay head from Camp Collier, 4.6 x 3.4 x 3, 1-1926-0818.

Figure 19. Nemayaq Wooden Carvings Nemayaq, the carver of these wooden ﬁgures, was a great artist and legendary culture hero on St. Lawrence Island in the early twentieth century. He was probably born in Siberia and immigrated to the island later. Nemayaq’s descendants remember

16

that some of the carvings had pet names. Front center: 10 cm, 1-1927-NN; 9.5 cm, UA94-001-0138; Back from left to right: 14 cm, 1-1927-0492; 14 cm, 1-1927-0491; 15 cm, 0199-1927; 9 cm, 1-1927-0490; 11 cm, UA74-066-0005.

Figure 20. Yup’ik Wooden Figures This group includes ﬁgures from three different Yup’ik regions. Such ﬁgures were used as amulets, appendages to masks, and were inserted into kayak models. The objects illustrated here may have been used in any of these ways. Left to right, top row: Old Togiak partial ﬁgures, 12.1 x 3.1 x 2.3, UA65-011-1144;

8 x 1.6 x 1.3, UA65-011-1608; 9 x 2.6 x 1.9, UA65-011-1172; 9.1 x 1.9 x 1.7, UA65-011-1638; Nunivak Island ﬁ gure, 10.1 x 3.4 x 2.2, 1-1927-0394. Bottom row: Old Togiak full ﬁgure, 6.3 x 1.5 x 1.1, UA65-011-1606; Hooper Bay ﬁgures, 4.6 x 2 x 1.1, 1-19500187; 3.3 x 1.1 x 0.9, 1-1950-0198.

artist and culture hero Nemayaq may have been created for this purpose (Fair 1982:52; Geist and Rainey 1936:34)14 (Fig. 19). In the Central Yup’ik area a ﬁgurine could be carved to stand in for someone absent from a settlement during an important ritual (Michael 1967:288–289). In the same area, shamans, like those on St. Lawrence Island, prescribed the carving of ﬁgurines as a cure for infertility. The husband of the infertile pair was instructed to carve the ﬁgurine and to perform secret rites with it. Afterward, his wife was instructed to sleep with the ﬁgurine under her pillow (Ray 1961:17).15 In the men’s house, human ﬁgurines, sometimes wrapped in an eider duck skin, hung from a centrally placed circular framework that could be raised and lowered (ellanguaq) (Fienup-Riordan 1996:126; Michael 1967:129; Nelson 1899:382–383, 494). It should be remembered that, because of the animistic nature of Eskimo religion,

people believed that ﬁgurines used in ritual contexts actually lived (Fair 1999). Along the upper Kuskokwim, for example, so absolute was this belief that such ﬁgurines were thought to walk, talk, and wear out their clothes (Fienup-Riordan 1996:131). Among the Central Yupiit and neighboring Deg Hit’an Athabascans, whose territory abutted the Yupiit on the upper Yukon River, human ﬁgurines were used in a number of contexts (Fig. 20), the most important of which were the mid-winter doll festivities and as grave markers. In the Central Yup’ik area people erected wooden memorials to the dead that often included human efﬁgies (Fienup-Riordan 1996:98, 2003:41).16 According to Nelson, full-body ﬁgurines were erected at Big Lake (between the Yukon and Kuskokwim rivers) “in honor of people whose bodies were lost” (1899:318). In Crow Village, abandoned in the nineteenth century,

Intimates and Efﬁgies

17

Oswalt and VanStone found a memorial pole with a bird at the top and a life-sized carving of a young girl at its base. The pole had been erected by a community leader in memory of his daughter, who died during childhood. The neck of the carving was encircled by a bead necklace, and its face was grease-stained from ritual feedings (Oswalt and VanStone 1967:92). Little speciﬁc information about the context of these markers is recorded, and there are conﬂicting opinions as to whether they represented speciﬁc or generalized portraits of the deceased (Ray 1981:37–38; 1982). The best-documented ritual use of human ﬁgurines among the Central Yupiit is the so-called doll festival. In early spring, many communities held ceremonies, during which they consecrated a human ﬁgurine in the men’s house. For that next year, the consecrated human ﬁgurine was used to divine the presence of game. According to Nelson, the festival was held in settlements along the lower Yukon, as far inland as the largely Athabascan settlement of Anvik, and according to William J. Fisher, it was held on the Alaska Peninsula and on Kodiak Island (Donta 1993:188–189; Osgood 1940:423–425). A wooden doll or human ﬁgurine17 was placed in the community house18 where it was the focus of a ceremony. Afterward, the shaman wrapped the doll in birch bark and hung it, along with some masks, in a tree at a secret location. There it served as a kind of oracle, and it was fed and consulted throughout the year to foretell the availability of game. The next spring the ﬁgurine was removed and returned to the ceremonial house, and its birch bark coverings were removed. If caribou were to be abundant, the shaman would ﬁ nd caribou hair in the ﬁgurine’s birch bark wrap; if the salmon were to return in large numbers, ﬁsh scales would be found in the folds instead. In some places, the disclosure of human hair was thought to foretell the death of community members. Each year, a new doll replaced the old, which was brought in from its secret tree, consulted, and disposed of (FienupRiordan 1991:188–189; Nelson 1899:494).19 Athabascan Figurines. The Deg Hit’an Athabascans—who lived upriver from the Yupiit, frequently intermarried with them and appear to have borrowed many Yup’ik cultural adaptations (de Laguna 1973:133)—held a similar doll festival. Thanks to the Deg Hit’an informants of anthropologist Cornelius Osgood, who worked among them in the late 1930s, we have a detailed picture of the Deg Hit’an version of the ceremony, the outlines of which may be roughly similar to the one sketched out by Nelson ﬁfty years earlier.

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According to Osgood, the dolls used in the Deg Hit’an festival varied in height from eight to twelve inches. Their heads were of realistically carved spruce wood, painted red, and their bodies were of bundled grass or caribou hair (which was considered inferior to grass). Unlike the Yup’ik ceremony, which appears to have used a single doll, the Deg Hit’an festival used a male and female pair. The male doll was distinguished by a pair of labrets and the miniature drum and drumsticks he held; the female doll had chin tattoos; both were clothed in everyday dress (Osgood 1940:423–425). As among the Central Yupiit, the purpose of the Deg Hit’an dolls and doll ceremony was to foretell the availability of game. For the ceremony, which was probably held in the fall, the dolls were wrapped in wood shavings and birch bark and brought into the men’s house, where they were unwrapped and examined for the presence of certain omens (possibly caribou hair or ﬁsh scales as among the Central Yupiit). They were then tied to a vertical supporting rod, which was pegged into a table. During the ceremony the shaman who had commissioned the dolls persuaded them to speak, which they did in low whistles. At the end of the performance the dolls were rewrapped and returned to a hiding place in a spruce tree outside the village, known only to the shaman. If anyone accidentally stumbled upon them, the person quickly retreated for fear of being struck blind (Osgood 1940:423–425).20 In addition to the Deg Hit’an, several other Athabascan groups also used human ﬁgurines in their rituals. Among the Tanaina Athabascans, for instance, the socalled “devil doll” was employed as a means of removing the evil spirit from an afﬂicted person (Fig. 21). Devil dolls were carved by shamans and were sometimes clothed in complete suits of caribou skin. To remove the evil spirit, the sick person was brought into the darkened ceremonial house, where the shaman danced to the beat of a drum, holding the doll close to him. The performance sometimes lasted several evenings, the climax occurring when the exhausted shaman thrust the doll at the patient and sank to the ground. Then the doll disappeared and the patient arose, weak but in better health (Osgood 1937:179). Inupiaq Figurines. Early travelers reported a wide variety of ritual uses for human ﬁgurines among the Inupiaq Eskimos of the Arctic coast. In 1791, Karl H. Merck observed at Cape Rodney on the Seward Peninsula that the local Inupiaq Eskimos hung small ﬁgurines inside the house near a lamp or in summer, near

Chapter 1

Figure 21. Male Figurine This Tanaina Athabascan doll was collected by Russian scientist I. G. Voznesenskiy on the Kenai Peninsula in 1841. Its purpose is unknown, but the elaborate decoration suggests that it was not a child’s toy and might have been a so-called devil doll. Collection of the Museum of Anthropology and Ethnography (Kunstkamera), St. Petersburg, Russia no. 2667-15; 35 cm.

the smoke-hole of a tent;21 he also observed the same kind of small human ﬁgurines tied on stakes near the house (Ray 1977:17). The University Museum, University of Pennsylvania collection includes a jointed ivory ﬁgurine collected on King Island. The ﬁgurine, which is engraved with drawings of whales’ ﬂukes and caribou, may have been a shaman’s puppet and possibly represents a wolf-man, another example of the permeability of the spiritual and human realms and of the ability of humans and animals to transform into one another (Kaplan and Barsness 1986:154, ﬁg. 146). Three examples of human ﬁgurines used for ritual purposes have been recovered from caves on Sledge Island, near Cape Rodney. This example (Figs. 22a, 22b), found by Dave Walluk in 1956, may have been found guarding the entryway to a cave that contained a large number of objects considered to be a whaler’s ritual paraphernalia.

Intimates and Efﬁgies

Figures 22a (top) and 22b (bottom). Sledge Island Float This wooden carving represents both a human when standing (top) and a whale when laid down (bottom). The Inupiat believed the spirit of the whale was female. Found on Sledge Island, this ﬁgure was probably part of a whaling kit that contained ﬂoats, harpoon heads, a charm kit, and other objects required for a successful whale hunt. The eyes are made of quartz crystal, a material believed to have magical powers. 11.5 x 10.5 x 33.5, UA90-001-0031.

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In 1912, William VanValin found two nearly identical ﬁgurines under strikingly similar circumstances. In this case, most of the paraphernalia were collected along with the ﬁgurine and eventually deposited at the University Museum, University of Pennsylvania (Kaplan, Jordan, and Sheehan 1984:16–23). These ﬁgurines, and presumably the UAM ﬁgurine as well, apparently doubled as ﬂoats that could be attached to a dead or dying whale so that it would not sink before reaching shore. When performing this function, the ﬁgurines would roll over with their whale-like backs exposed (Fig. 22b). The quartz crystal 22 of which the ﬁgurines’ eyes were made was thought to have magical properties that helped the whalers locate their prey and compelled the prey to come within striking distance (Kaplan and Barsness 1986:142, ﬁg. 120). All three ﬁgurines appear to be female, and Kaplan, Jordan and Sheehan point out that the powerful taboos governing female behavior during whaling season reﬂect their strong symbolic associations with whales (Kaplan, Jordan, and Sheehan 1984:19, Fig. 120; Zumwalt 1987). The date of the ﬁgurine at the University of Alaska Museum is unknown, but the examples in Philadelphia have been dated by associated objects to the ﬁ rst half of the nineteenth century, and it is likely that the one at the University of Alaska Museum is about the same age (Kaplan, Jordan, and Sheehan 1984:19). Farther north, in the village of Point Hope, numerous types of human ﬁgurines, especially puppets,23 were used in rituals and entertainments held in the ceremonial houses and were connected to whaling. Before the turn of the century, the most important part of the fall whaling rituals was the four-to ﬁve-day “sitting,” during which the men who wanted to be great hunters carved small ﬁgurines, many of which were human in shape. Carved out of driftwood, these small ﬁgurines (puguqs) were hung by thongs of sea mammal hide from the rafters of the men’s house during the sitting ceremony and were burned at its conclusion. The ﬁgurines commemorated legendary feats of ancestors. In the winter of 1940, a Point Hope man named Agaveksina carved two human ﬁgurines—one representing his uncle, who had been a shaman, and the second a shaman the uncle had met while on a spirit journey over Siberia. One ﬁgurine was carved with a leg drawn up because the Siberian shaman had ﬂown in this curious manner. Replicas of the original puguqs were carved for archaeologist Froelich Rainey, and both are now deposited at the University of Alaska museum (Rainey 1947:248–249) (Fig. 23). Another Point Hope ceremony, the great thanksgiving feast dedicated to the souls of dead whales, took

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Figure 23. Flying Puguqs These two ﬂying puguqs were carved in Point Hope by Agaveksina in 1940. They represent two shamans, one from Alaska, the other from Siberia, who met while in ﬂ ight over the Bering Sea. Traditionally, a puguq was carved and hung in the ceremonial house to represent the actions of legendary ancestors. These replicas were carved for archaeologist Froelich Rainey. Left: Inupiaq shaman, 20 cm, 1-1940-0144. Right: Siberian shaman, 34.3 cm, 1-1940-0143.

place as part of the fall whaling ceremonies. It featured a model skin boat complete with a whaling crew that could be animated to paddle the boat. One example was deposited at the University of Alaska Museum by Froelich Rainey, who commissioned it in 1940 (Figs. 24a, 24b). This cleverly constructed mechanical toy was brought out at the end of one of the ﬁnal rituals held in conjunction with the fall sitting ceremony, which has been described by both Rainey (1947:250) and Knud Rasmussen (1927:332).24 The third major ﬁgurine appearing in the annual ceremonial cycle at Point Hope was a nearly life-sized puppet, which was the focus of one of nine dances held on New Year’s Eve.25 The UAM example is about three feet tall and is clothed in a traditional Point Hope-style beaver and sealskin suit 26 (Fig. 25). The ﬁgurine, which was operated by strings of cotton twine, danced in time with the drumming and appeared to sing along with the human singers, its mouth opening and closing along with theirs. A ball (possibly made of sealskin) was dangled in front of the ﬁgurine, which tried fruitlessly to snatch it with its mouth, only succeeding at the end of the performance (Tundra Times 1964:1). John Murdoch returned from the three villages around Point Barrow at the end of the nineteenth century to deposit at the Smithsonian Institution a number

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Figures 24a (below) and 24b (detail). Point Hope Umiak Model with Breathing Tube Umiak models like these were used during ceremonies in Point Hope. On the back of the whaling captain is a seal intestine tube that was inﬂ ated during the ceremony to give the impression of breathing. 84 x 26, 1-1940-0134.

Figure 25. Point Hope Marionette This marionette was the main character of a dance held during the New Year’s celebrations in Point Hope. The dance is called Choyaqluqa in Inupiaq. UA64-013-0001.

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of miniature dolls and human ﬁgurines, most of ivory but a few of wood, bone, or soapstone. The purposes of these are unknown, although Murdoch’s observations about the absence of play dolls suggests a ritual context (1892:380). Four of these ﬁgurines warrant mention. There are several full-body representations of humans made of driftwood with the usual nubs for arms; Murdoch illustrated a male and female pair (Murdoch 1892, ﬁg. 388). Another ﬁgurine, made of a fragment from an old soapstone lamp (Murdoch 1892, ﬁg. 391), probably represents Walrus Man. The Eskimo belief system included a mythological past during which animals and humans could transform at will, and the theme of a walrus–man transformation was widely expressed in the folklore and legends of northern Alaska (Kaplan and Barsness 1986:117, 154).

Murdoch also collected several ingeniously engineered puppets, one of which paddles a kayak (Murdoch 1892:380–381, 395). Aleut Figurines. The most outstanding examples of historic period ritual ﬁ gurines from the Aleutians are small likenesses of human beings carved from ivory and attached to hunting hats as charms (Black 1991). Usually about an inch tall, the ﬁgurines were generally represented in a seated position with their hands resting on their knees (Fig. 26). The bodies are schematic, but the heads are carved in great detail.27 Acting as guardians of the weapons, these ﬁgurines also helped the hunter to aim accurately (Black 1991). Such ﬁgurines were considered idealized portraits of the wearer of the hat, and were thought to assist the

Figure 26. Aleut Visor Aleut leaders wore visors for hunting and ceremonial occasions. The ﬁgurines adorning the hats depicted an idealized view of the hunter to please his prey. Sometimes entire hunting scenes were depicted on the hats. Eighteenth-century observers noted

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that similar ﬁgures were found near barabaras (underground houses) as protection against evil spirits. Few old hats still have their original carvings. This contemporary visor was made by Gertrude Svarney, 1990. UA90-022-0001.

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wearer by presenting the best possible depiction of him to prey animals—to show his respect for them and thereby convince them to offer themselves to him. This may relate to the earlier practice of carving human faces on bone weapons, reported by Waldemar Jochelson (1925:95). According to S. V. Ivanov, Aleut hats of the eighteenth century had such ivory miniatures, which were used in more elaborate scenes illustrating a number of themes: hunters pursuing land animals with arrows, throwing spears and harpoons, sitting in boats wearing wooden hats and armed with spears, and hunting sea mammals and mythical animals (Black 1991). Also from the Aleutians is an unusual collection of ﬁ fty miniature ivory carvings in the National Museum of Finland. The ﬁgurines are engaged in a number of activities; some, such as a drummer, are recognizable, but others are not. Whether the ﬁgurines were made for a ritual purpose or for sale is unknown (Varjola 1990:198–199). Northwest Coast Figurines. Among the Tlingit Indians of the northern Northwest Coast, human ﬁgurines were a fulcrum of ceremonial life and social practice. The creation of moieties, for example, was traced back to a mythological ancestor’s relations with a crest animal. Thus, a complete list of the depictions of these and other culture heroes in Northwest Coast Indian art and ritual would require a whole essay in itself. We will limit ourselves here to mentioning a few shamanic uses and concentrate on the play dolls used by children. A ﬁgurine called a yake, or spirit guard, was placed at the head of a shaman’s grave to ward off evil spirits (Johnson 1973:18) (Fig. 27). Some shamans’ dolls were painted red, which symbolized the power to restore the dead to life. They are believed to have previously stood on seal-like bases because they were thought not to walk, but to glide through the air as easily as a seal through water (de Laguna 1960:229). These ﬁgurines were thought to be so powerful that only those who had converted to Christianity dared approach them on pain of death. Tlingit shamans also had small wooden carvings of yake that they attached to headdresses and costumes. When the shaman began a healing séance, he called the spirits into their images, thus transforming art into a potent supernatural force (Jonaitis 1986:110–115). Shamans often used charms in human form for curing illness and dispelling evil. These small carvings of ivory or bone depicted supernatural beings who could help the shaman in his responsibilities.

Intimates and Efﬁgies

Sometimes the shaman would leave a charm with his patient as a healing amulet (Jonaitis 1986:97). As with the closely related Eyak Indians of the Copper River Delta, Northwest Coast Indian shamans’ dolls were tangible representations of shamanic dreams or spirit visitations. Usually clad in a miniature dance apron and blanket and often embellished with real human hair for a more lifelike appearance, Eyak shamans’ dolls could be used to ward off evil spirits, witches, or another shaman intending bodily harm (Johnson 1973:9–10, 18). Among the Eyak, Kaj Birket-Smith recorded detailed information on human ﬁgurines, which seem to have occupied a prominent position in Eyak shamanic contexts (Birket-Smith and de Laguna 1938). When a young man undertook the spirit quest required to become a shaman, he made a doll from the skin of the ﬁ rst animal to appear to him in a vision, an example of the widespread belief among Alaska Natives of the

Figure 27. Tlingit Shaman Figure This wooden carving holds sticks in each hand with deer dew claws attached. This ﬁgure was identiﬁed by Elaine Ramos as belonging to her uncle, a shaman. Ramos’ father remembered seeing the ﬁgure dance at a contest between two shamans, ca. 1888. From the TeiKweidee clan of Yakutat. 63.75 cm. Courtesy Sheldon Jackson Museum, Sitka, cat. no. I.A.34.

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interchangeability of human and animal forms and spirits. The doll was stuffed with grass and embodied his most powerful helping spirit (Birket-Smith and de Laguna 1938:209).28 Shamans made wooden dolls for other purposes. Evidently such dolls were thought to be capable of magical ﬂ ight and could be dispatched on journeys of as much as a thousand miles to do a shaman’s bidding. These dolls could be handled by women without any ill effects. For example, the aunt of one shaman found such a ﬁgurine in his bedding and, perhaps out of fear, threw it on the ﬂoor. The shaman rebuked her, but the power of the ﬁgurine was not diminished (Birket-Smith and de Laguna 1938:210). A human ﬁgurine appears

in the Eyak legend of a shaman who made his daughter come back to life by implanting a wooden doll in her, later born as her human child (Birket-Smith and de Laguna 1938:226). Only one instance of a ritually used human ﬁgurine has been reported for the Prince William Sound Alutiiq more recently. According to an informant of de Laguna’s, a powerful shaman from the south shore of the Kenai Peninsula made a wooden doll for his childless wife, and through his powers, he made the doll walk. The shaman’s wife dressed the doll in pearls, beads, and sea otter skins and fondled and suckled it until she died. She was buried with the doll (de Laguna 1956:221).

Modern Dolls and Doll Makers, 1950 to 1990 The onset of the modern period of doll making can be correlated with several profound changes in the Alaska Native way of life. After 1890, Christian missionaries turned their attention to Alaska as one of the few remaining colonial outposts for saving heathen souls (Fig. 28). Whether gentle or harsh, the end result of conversion was the suppression 29 of indigenous belief systems and with it, the making of the human ﬁgurines that brought these religions to life. Christian missionaries were central not only to the abandonment of “idolatry” but also of Native-made play dolls. Most of the missionary schools across Alaska were founded as part of the churches’ efforts to convert Alaska Natives to Christianity. In the classroom, children were exposed to Western imagery both sacred and secular and perhaps also to actual Western play dolls. As trading posts and stores sprang up in rural Alaska to service the fur trade, play dolls30 of Western manufacture gradually became available (Fig. 29). In many areas, children continued to play with cloth dolls. However, by the 1920s and 1930s, Western-made dolls were growning in desirability and Natives were occasionally replicating bisque-faced dolls out of ivory in the Central Yup’ik and St. Lawrence Island Yupik areas (see Fig. 41). On the other hand, from the mid-1800s onward, Native-made dolls were a popular souvenir item to trade with Euroamerican visitors. In the Aleut and Alutiiq areas, with the exception of basketry, artists abandoned traditional arts,31 including kayak models, by the early nineteenth century. The Aleuts and Alutiiqs apparently never made souvenir dolls for outsiders, probably because of the early disruption of their traditional culture through disease and decimation

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(Ray 1981:56–57) brought by Russian exploration and occupation. But in the Yup’ik and Inupiaq areas where change was slower, the creation of dolls for the tourist market was fueled by the growing presence of non-Native teachers, nurses, and government employees. Because of Westerners’ lack of familiarity with Alaska Native cultures, these dolls had to be dressed in identiﬁably Eskimo or Indian clothing. This in turn reduced stylistic variation of Alaska Native dolls (Ray

Figure 28. This portrait illustrates the blending of Christianity and indigenous belief. The infant wears a Catholic medal (perhaps a St. Christopher medal) on its cap, just as the child’s ancestors may have worn other amulets and charms. This medal may have been attached to protect the child from harmful spirits or inﬂuences. Alaskan Sheperd Collection, acc. no. 88-117-80N, Archives, Alaska and Polar Regions Department, Rasmuson Library, University of Alaska Fairbanks.

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1977:39). For example, the cloth play dolls common to most Alaska Native groups during the early historic period were not widely reproduced for sale, undoubtedly because they were not recognized as “Alaska Native” in comparison to those clothed in fur or sea mammal intestine parkas. These changes were gradual and occurred at different dates throughout Alaska, depending upon the isolation of the group. However, it is probably safe to say that most or all Alaska Native cultures, including the types of dolls they make, were affected by the end of World War II. We will use 1950 as a reliable starting date of the modern period of Native Alaska doll making. During the modern period the main producers of souvenir dolls were the Inupiaq, Central Yup’ik, and St. Lawrence Island Yupik Eskimos. According to Susan Fair (1982:55–71), there are ﬁve main types of dolls of

the modern period, and these can be classiﬁed according to their stylistic differences.

Inupiaq From the Inupiaq villages of Shishmaref and Brevig Mission came dolls made of reindeer or caribou antler (Fig. 30, far right), which served as a cheaper and more available substitute for the ivory used earlier, which had become expensive and more difﬁcult to obtain. Universally referred to as “horn dolls,” the antler dolls originated after World War II. Dressed in traditional fur clothing, the dolls were ﬁ rst intended as children’s play things, and it was only later that they were sold as souvenirs. The reindeer antler used to make horn dolls is dried for several months before use. The shape with the outline of arms engraved

Figure 29. King Island, ca. 1940. This little girl, who has her large western doll beside her, accepts a malted milk tablet from her mother. Alaskan Sheperd Collection, acc. no. 88-117-98N, Archives, Alaska and Polar Regions Department, Rasmuson Library, University of Alaska Fairbanks.

Intimates and Efﬁgies

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into the horn is reminiscent of nineteenth-century dolls from northwestern Alaska (Jones 1982:29). In the late 1960s, horn doll production slowed because of the large amounts of antler exported from Seward Peninsula villages to Japan for use as an aphrodisiac (Ray 1977:50).32 Whale bone dolls were also made in Shishmaref. These simple, columnar-style dolls had facial features painted on with black paint, but they are otherwise unelaborated. In Kotzebue, Ethel Washington (Agnauglugaq) (1889–1967) popularized 33 portrait-style dolls with realistically carved wooden faces and accurately detailed skin clothing. Her style was widely copied by other Kotzebue doll makers (Fig. 31) and she was also the ﬁ rst doll maker whose name became known to non-Native customers. Ethel Washington began making her wooden-head, soft-bodied dolls in the 1930s, when tourists ﬁrst came to Kotzebue on Wien Airlines day trips. None of her dolls from this early date can be identiﬁed, and it was

not until the death of her husband, George, in 1951, that her doll-making career began in earnest (Hedrick and Hedrick 1983:1–6). Washington made the dolls herself, including the strikingly realistic heads. She whittled them with a Boy Scout knife out of wood collected on the Kobuk River and then ﬁ nished them with a single-edge razor blade. It is unusual that she worked the wood herself,34 since woodworking was considered the province of men in traditional times, even as late as mid-century. Birch was especially desirable because it is soft when freshly cut and later hardens without cracking (Hedrick and Hedrick 1983:6–8). The open mouths of the ﬁgurines almost always revealed teeth. The hair of Washington’s dolls was either human hair, from wigs, or wolverine fur. The bodies were cut out from patterns and made out of caribou skin. The c lot hing and accessor ies accompany ing Washington’s dolls were especially remarkable. Tiny parkas and boots were cut out from patterns and

Figure 30. Collaboration and Innovation The increase in doll collecting and the reduction in raw materials have created an innovative and collaborative movement amongst the Alaska Native men and women. Left to right: coiled grass doll, Cup’ik, maker: Viva Wesley Smith, 20 x 22 x 12.5, UA94-009-0016AC; St. Lawrence Island woman, St. Lawrence Island Yupik, makers: Floyd and Amelia Kingeekuk, 32 x 20.5 x 5.5, UA86-003-0013; dipnetter, Cup’ik, maker: Clothilda Stone,

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22.5 cm, UA97-021-0001; Yup’ik man in fur parka, maker: Margaret (Penni) Abraham with Jeff Lyons, UA90-003-0007; caribou-jaw sled and doll, Inupiaq, maker: Elizabeth Driggs, 61 x 12.7 (fully extended) UA81-003-0129AE; horn doll, Inupiaq, 9 x 3 x 3, UA71-057-0005; horn doll, Inupiaq, 17 x 8 x 5, UA67098-0211; horn doll, Inupiaq, maker: Delbert Eningowuk, 18 x 7.5 x 4, UA88-007-0004AB.

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sewn with minute stitches. The dolls always carried Washington’s trademark accessories, usually a Kobuk River–style birchbark basket and a wooden berry scoop for women, a bow and arrows and a sheathed ivory knife for men. The boots of the early dolls were dyed with alder dye and had genuine bearded seal bottoms. These complex and beautifully rendered dolls required about three days each to make (Hedrick and Hedrick 1983:9). Ethel Washington’s success inspired other Kotzebue women doll makers, among them Lena Sours, Rosa Francis, Emma Black Lincoln, and Minnie Norton (Hedrick and Hedrick 1983:10). In the next generation of younger doll makers, the dolls of Dolly Spencer and Eva Hefﬂe are especially noteworthy. Dolly Mendenhall Spencer (1930–2005) (Fig. 32), who learned skin sewing and sinew twisting from classes taught by Lena Sours, was born near Kotzebue but presently lives in Homer. She made her ﬁ rst doll when she was in the sixth grade. Her exquisitely

articulated dolls are larger, more elaborately dressed, and accompanied by a wider variety of imaginative accessories. Furthermore, Spencer’s dolls go beyond the generic portraits of Ethel Washington, often speciﬁcally portraying members of her family, her community, or other people whom she admires. For instance, one doll in the UAM collection portrays Marvin R. “Muktuk” Marston, founder of the Alaska Territorial Guard and widely beloved throughout rural Alaska. Spencer, who also carves her heads out of birch like other Kotzebue doll makers, prefers to use Alaskan materials for other doll parts, but she sometimes uses imported items such as coyote fur in order to achieve the desired effect (Fosdick 1984). If Ethel Washington was the ﬁ rst Alaskan doll maker with name recognition, Dolly Spencer was the ﬁ rst to achieve international acclaim. In 1996, the National Endowment for the Arts voted Spencer their highest honor, a National Heritage Fellowship, for her contributions to Alaska Native dolls and doll making.

Figure 31. Kotzebue Dolls Ethel Washington and Lena Sours started Kotzebue-style wooden-faced dolls. Both were accomplished seamstresses, and both produced wonderfully life-like dolls. Left to right: man in hunting gear, Inupiaq, maker: Ethel Washington, 29 x

Intimates and Efﬁgies

14 x 6.5, UA83-003-0003; mother and baby, Inupiaq, maker: Ethel Washington, 28 x 14 x 6, UA84-022-0002B; family of three, Inupiaq, maker: Lena Sours, (max) 33 x 22 x 6, UA85003-0044AC.

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Figure 32. Dolly Spencer Dolls Dolly Spencer followed in the tradition of Kotzebue doll makers by producing life-like wooden-faced dolls. She became especially well-known for her extreme attention to detail and her realistic portraits of people she knows and admires. Left to

right: Inupiaq woman, 38 x 18 x 10, UA81-003-0180; Muktuk Marston, 37 x 19 x 8, UA82-003-0048AC; Ida Mendenhall-Mills, 33 x 12 x 11, UA82-003-0065.

Eva Hefﬂe is one of a handful of doll makers around Alaska to popularize the so-called “activity dolls.” Mounted on a board or another stiff surface, activity dolls are at the center of a miniature diorama, usually demonstrating a typical traditional activity of village life. First appearing in the 1950s, they respond to non-Native buyers’ nostalgic preference for tradition, whether it is a doll’s clothing style or the activity. Hefﬂe, who was among the earliest artists to make activity dolls, did not begin making dolls until she was an adult and had moved from Kotzebue to Fairbanks. She has made at least thirty types of activity scenes, with dolls represented making clothing and preparing food (Figs. 33, 34). Hefﬂe’s activity dolls carry the Kotzebue emphasis on traditional accessories to its greatest elaboration. Hefﬂe, who continues to live near Fairbanks, uses Alaska Native materials such as sea mammal intestine, ﬁsh skin, caribou hide, and birch bark that has been

sent to her by relatives still engaged in subsistence activities in the Kotzebue area (Smith 1998). Artists in several mainland villages around Bering Strait continue to make dolls for sale. On the Seward Peninsula, especially from the village of Wales, artists make ivory-faced, soft-body dolls of a mother and child.

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St. Lawrence Island Yupik The St. Lawrence Island Yupik villages of Gambell and Savoonga became doll making centers recently. Characteristics of most modern St. Lawrence Island dolls are their predominantly red (based on earlier uses of alder dye) and white (bleached sealskin) colors and the decorative use of beads for earrings and braid embellishments. Floyd and Amelia Kingeekuk of Savoonga originated a doll type with realistically carved walrus ivory heads and hands and dressed in detailed skin clothing, which was probably inspired by

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Figure 33. Eva Hefﬂe Dolls Doll maker Eva Hefﬂe has created activity dolls for many years. She also makes entire dioramas that incorporate many individual activities and combines them to show a slice of life. Here she

has re-created a hide-covered tent scene with ﬁ ve separate dolls, each involved in its own activites, including making clothing and preparing food. 31 x 47 x 43, UA81-003-0145.

Figure 34. Activity Dolls Inupiaq Eva Hefﬂe started making dolls after she had moved away from Kotzebue, partly as a way to learn about her own culture and partly as a way to make money. Sold for only a few cents when she ﬁrst began, now they are found in museums and private collections all over the world. The wooden heads she uses follow in the

tradition of her home of Kotzebue. Left to right: man making ﬁsh trap, 13.5 x 16 x 12, UA81-003-0139; man with drill bow, 16 x 10 x 12.5, UA84-022-0004; seal hunter, 20 x 11 x 13, UA81-003-0105; woman with basket and spoon, 20 x 13 x 10, UA81-003-0102; woman crimping mukluks, 12 x 12 x 12, UA81-003-095.

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the prehistoric Old Bering Sea ivory ﬁgurines dug up on the island. Their dolls usually are single ﬁgures such as hunters or women wearing traditional St. Lawrence Island parkas (Fig. 35). Miriam Kilowiyi of Savoonga is known for her soft-bodied St. Lawrence Island baby dolls. They have bleached sealskin faces with features stitched in embroidery thread and are dressed in the typical all-inone combination suits with moss diapers, bib-like fur collars, and caps with bead decorations. Pansy Omwari of Gambell (her mother, Hazel was also a doll maker) makes soft-bodied dolls, mainly women dressed in St. Lawrence Island combination suits wearing traditional mukluks. Her dolls also have sealskin faces with stitched-on features. Collectors of Alaska Native dolls often vie for the meticulously rendered dolls of Helen Carius, who died in 1998. In her later years, Carius had begun making activity dolls illustrating typical St. Lawrence

Island occupations such as bird-egg collecting and seal ﬂensing (Fig. 36).

Central Yup’ik A relatively limited number of women in southwestern Alaska make coiled grass dolls, a spinoff of the coiled grass basketry practiced widely throughout the YukonKuskokwim Delta. Viva Wesley Smith from Mekoryuk is one of these doll makers. One Central Yup’ik village where modern doll making innovations developed is the village of Eek. Two styles are associated with Eek: the oval-faced dolls with wooden heads, probably originating with Stella Cleveland in the 1940s (Fair 1982:47; Jones 1982:15);35 and the leather or skin-faced dolls, sometimes referred to as “old people dolls,” which originated in the 1970s with Eek resident Grace White. Possibly related to the shrunken apple-faced dolls of mainstream American

Figure 35. St. Lawrence Island Dolls The doll makers on St. Lawrence Island are known for intricate detail and expert reproduction of historic clothing styles. Here several artists’ works are represented. Left to right: woman in decorated parka, maker: Josephine Ungott, 35.5 cm, UA81-003-

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0052; seated infant, maker: Miriam Kilowiyi, 28 cm, UA66-0230002; woman in decorated parka, maker: Ellie Kululhon, 40.5 cm, UA81-003-0025; woman in decorated parka, maker: Floyd and Amelia Kingeekuk, 30 cm, UA86-003-0013.

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Figure 36. Woman Preparing a Seal Helen Slwooko Carius was from Savoonga, on St. Lawrence Island. She was known for her delicate stitching, especially on the sealskin faces of her dolls. Carius duplicated the traditional tattoo patterns with black thread, rather than simply drawing the design onto the surface. She used Native materials like sealskin, sea mammal intestine, wolf, beaver, and other skins to make her dolls. 14 cm, UA99-004-0001.

Figure 37. Paniyak Family Creations Three generations of Paniyak doll makers are represented in this photo. A special style of hide-covered faced dolls developed from this Chevak family, and they have become extremely popular with Alaskans because of their humorous way of depicting real life. Left to right: dancer, Cup’ik, maker: Janice Paniyak, 24 x 14 x 12, UA98-012-0001; woman eating akutaq, Cup’ik, maker:

Ursula Paniyak, 23 x 13 x 22, UA97-018-0001AB; woman with basket, Cup’ik, maker: Ursula Paniyak, 21.9 x 9.4 x 7.9, UA98001-0004; male doll, Cup’ik, maker: Rosalie Paniyak, 26 x 11 x 6.5, UA83-003-0011; honeybucket doll, Cup’ik, maker: Rosalie Paniyak, 19 x 11.5 x 15.5, UA97-022-0001.

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Figure 38. Statue of Liberty This doll was made by Rosalie Paniyak. It clearly represents the Statue of Liberty, down to the correct positioning of her feet under the long robe (which looks very similar to a long kuspuk). The Native people of Alaska have been in contact with Westerners since as early as the eighteenth century. They have adapted and become an active part of Western society while also preserving their own sense of identity. Rosalie has taken her uniquely Cup’ik doll style and recreated one of the most important American symbols in that style. 55 x 22 x 16, UA2001008-0003. Photo by James H. Barker.

Figure 39. Chevak Dolls Perhaps inspired by the success of local doll maker Rosalie Paniyak, other women in Chevak make dolls with sealskin faces, doing interesting activities and dressed in creative outﬁ ts. This group of dolls were made by six different doll makers. From left to right: doll carrying bucket, maker Natalia Nayamin, 29 x 12.5 x 6.5, UA98-025-0006; dipnetter, maker Betty Fermoyle, 32 x 17.5 x 18, UA98-025-0005; male doll, maker Rosalie Paniyak, 64 x 50 x 30, UA98-025-0003; woman

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ﬁ shing, maker Rosalie Paniyak, 24 x 11 x 11, UA98-025-0002; honeybucket doll, maker Rosalie Paniyak, courtesy of Pamela Stern; woman with grass, maker Monica Friday, 37 x 12.5 x 13.5, UA98-025-0008; fetching water, maker Rosalie Paniyak, 25 x 10.5 x 11.5, UA98-025-0001; woman with pipe, maker Anna Martins, 43 x 16.5 x 18, UA98-025-0007; ﬁ shskin doll, maker Rose Kanrilak, 36 x 10 x 8.5, UA98-025-0004.

culture in that decade, old-people dolls break with tradition in depicting people as they are rather than an idealized picture of Alaska Native villagers. Both wooden-faced and old people dolls have been widely reproduced in other Central Yup’ik villages (Schuldberg 1996). Undoubtedly the most famous maker of dolls deriving from the old-people style is Rosalie Paniyak of Chevak. Paniyak’s dolls are humorous caricatures of village people engaged in ordinary experiences such as heading for the steam bath, basketmaking, ﬁshing and using the ubiquitous “honey bucket” (Fig. 37). In the 1980s Paniyak created a Statue of Liberty doll, which expresses the feeling of connections between Yup’ik/Cup’ik people and the wider world (Fig. 38). Rosalie usually includes a handwritten comment on her dolls, apparently at the suggestion of folklorist Susan W. Fair. Paniyak’s daughter Ursula

and grand-daughter Janice also have become excellent doll makers. Since the popularization of Paniyak ’s innovations, a number of doll makers, many from Chevak and Hooper Bay, have experimented with different aesthetics. Helen and Natalia Smith of Hooper Bay produced a number of bird-people dolls made from loon skins (Fig. 40). Another innovator is Rosalie Paniyak’s sister, Clothilda Stone of Hooper Bay (see Fig. 30). Stone creates imaginative “devil” dolls out of dried pike skin and other local ﬁsh. Her dolls include a traditional implement such as a ﬁsh net ingeniously whittled and knotted by her husband, Henry. In a pattern reminiscent of Kotzebue a few years earlier with the doll making of Ethel Washington, other Chevak women have started creating dolls based on Paniyak’s “anti-aesthetic” (Fig. 39).

Figure 40. Restricted Materials Federal regulations intended to help manage populations and over-harvesting of certain animals have hurt the art industry, especially doll making. Most artists attempt to accurately reproduce the clothing styles of their parents and grandparents, which becomes increasingly difﬁcult with the passage of these laws. These dolls are made from materials that are restricted under the Marine Mammal Protection Act (MMPA) of 1972

Intimates and Efﬁgies

and the Migratory Bird Treaty Act (MBTA) of 1918. Under these federal regulations, the sale of the pieces would be restricted, thus limiting the market for accurate and imaginative works of art. Dancers and drummers, Inupiaq, 17 x 25 x 14.5, UA92006-0007; doll with basket, Yup’ik, maker: Natalia Smith, 30.5 x 17 x 10, UA96-002-0001; doll with grass cup, Yup’ik, maker: Louise Toll, 26 x 12 x 4, UA71-057-0009.

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Contemporary Period, 1990–Present Recent economic, political, and demographic trends have all helped to shape the present-day social biography of Alaska Native doll making (Fig. 41). Among the many factors are new legislation affecting access to traditionally harvested birds and animals, growing rural poverty, urban migration, and the need for mass production. Legislation such as the Migratory Bird Treaty Act of 1918 (and its many, more recent amendments) has limited Alaska Native peoples’ access to traditionally harvested birds and animals by making it illegal to sell dolls made with feathers such as loon or eider (see Fig. 39). This is unfortunate for artists in the Yup’ik region.

Alaska Natives in rural locations usually live a subsistence life based on hunting and ﬁshing, but today this way of life depends on imported commodities such as snowmachines, four-wheelers, ﬁ shing boats, guns, and ammunition. Like all conveniences, these cost money. When there are shortfalls in subsistence harvest, this seriously affects bush communities, where wage-labor jobs are scarce. The current migration of rural residents into Alaska’s urban centers is largely because of these economic factors. The relationship of doll making to subsistence activities is critical and circular. On one hand, Alaska Natives have long depended on the sale of art to supplement their

Figure 41. New Audiences and Materials As missionaries and gold rushers began to make their way into the Yukon–Kuskokwim Delta of Alaska, new materials, designs, and audiences became available. Dolls and human ﬁgurines, once made for children or ceremony, now were created mainly for tourists. The dolls pictured here were made for all these audiences. The trio depicting a dance scene was made for an outsider to represent a traditional Yup’ik dance celebration. The large doll in the gut parka is either from St. Lawrence, Nunivak, or

34

Nelson Island. It is most likely modeled on a German bisquefaced doll brought into the region by a missionary’s child. The two dolls on the right were made and used by children or adults. From left to right: drummer, 14 cm, 0477-0001; female dancer, 20 cm, 0477-0003, male dancer, 16.5 cm, 0477-0002; female doll, Central or St. Lawrence Island Yup’ik, 33 cm, UA64-0210896; play doll, Yup’ik, 19 cm, UA64-021-0870; doll, Yup’ik, 14 cm, 1084-0010F.

Chapter 1

incomes in lean economic times. Yet with the number of subsistence hunters dwindling, the raw materials on which successful doll making depends become more difﬁcult—and expensive—to obtain. Alaska Native doll making will undoubtedly continue, although the creation of dolls with clothing made of materials associated with traditional ways of life depends in large part on a speedy and satisfactory resolution to the current state and federal subsistence-priority impasse (Lee 2003). New markets such as the internet will be increasingly important to artists in rural Alaska. Another new trend is the use of commercial web sites such as eBay, which often offer Alaska Native dolls for sale. These new trends and a resolution to the subsistence impasse should help to strengthen the future of one of Alaska’s oldest and liveliest Native art forms. Figure 42. Western Dolls in Native Dress Often, when Western goods entered villages across Alaska, they were altered to ﬁt the local aesthetic. Many Western-made dolls were-dressed in local clothing styles, as seen here by the mets^”eghe hoolaane and qaspeq in this photograph. Miss Koyukuk doll, Athabascan, 33 cm, UA90-007-0002AB; sparkle beach Barbie (kuspuk), Inupiaq, maker: Hilda Ashcraft, 30 x 10 x 9, UA96-008-0001.

Figure 43. Greenlandic Dolls Dolls like these Greenlandic Eskimo examples were made across the Arctic to sell to outsiders. The two with topknots are women. In Greenland, the topknot is a symbol of femininity. The ﬁ gure on the right is packing a baby in her gut parka,

Intimates and Efﬁgies

just like mothers in Alaska. Left to right: All three dolls from Ammassalik District, Greenland. Left to right: 7.5 x 6.1 x 8.5, UA66-011-0355; 9.5 x 3.3 x 2.6, UA66-011-0357; 11.6 x 4 x 3, UA66-011-0356.

35

Figure 44. Dolls to Educate Today, dolls are often used as a way to educate both Native and non-Native people about activities no longer undertaken. The activity dolls illustrate scenes from Native life such as net making, weaving, stor yknifing, and dancing. Modern activities are also depicted, including the woman carrying her nurse’s book. Clockwise from upper left: dancer and drummer, maker: Agnes Bostrom, Yup’ik, 31 x 21 x 18, UA98-022-

Figure 45. Innovation in Anaktuvuk Pass Established art forms are often adapted in new and innovative ways. The face of the doll on the right is a miniature Anaktuvuk Pass skin mask, for which this community is famous. From left to right: mask, maker: Simon Paneak, Nunamiut, 15.2 x 24, UA82003-0064; doll, maker: Susie Paneak, Nunamiut, 50.8 x 16.5, UA82-003-0063.

36

0001 AD and 29 x 16 x 19, UA98-022-0002AE; nurse’s aide, maker: Lucy Berr y, Yup’ik, 26 x 16.5 x 11, UA94-009-0025; girls stor yknifing, maker: Lucy Berr y, Yup’ik, 17.8 x 12.7 x 26.7, UA94-009-0024; man working on net, maker: Martina Oscar, Yup’ik, 12 x 11.5 x 14, UA68-020-0002; woman making a grass mat, maker: Lucy Berr y, Yup’ik, 13.9 x 14.6 x 11.4, UA94-009-0027.

Figure 46. Canadian Dolls During the 1940s and ’50s in Canada, there was a concerted effort to promote Native arts and crafts. Eventually, the soapstone carving and printmaking of the Canadian Inuit became known worldwide. Doll making also became popular because dolls were easy to ship, compact in size, and widely appreciated. This photo shows a male doll with a soapstone head, a mother and child wearing the traditional “beaver-tail” parka

(amautik) of Bafﬁ n Island, and a papier-mâché couple made as part of an art program at the Grenfell Mission, Labrador. From left to right: man in duffel parka, Canadian Inuit, 37 x 19 x 7, UA93-010-0001; mother and child, Canadian Inuit, 33 x 18 x 7, UA70-009-0001AB; woman doll, Canadian Inuit, 47 x 16, UA82-003-0092; male doll, Canadian Inuit, 49 x 17, UA82-003-0092.

Figure 47. Two Dolls of Undetermined Origin Left: The doll is probably Yup’ik, as indicated by the facial features and the construction of the boots. 5.5 cm, UA67-098-0196. Right: The beadwork and the parka style suggest that it may be Athabascan, although the many experts consulted were unable to conﬁ rm this. The heavy ornamentation of the doll tells us that it certainly was not a child’s plaything. The attached watch cogs and springs may indicate that it was used by a shaman. Siberian shamans often attached metal pieces to their clothing to bring on a trance state. The hair style and the piece of dentalium that pierces the nasal septum suggest a Gwich’in Athabascan origin. 25.4 x 9, UA78-015-0001AB.

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Notes 1

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Every Alaska Native culture is distinct from the others, but in order to survey the uses of the human ﬁgure across them all, we have sometimes generalized in places where cultural features were similar. The small number of loaned pieces for the exhibition came from the Alaska Native Medical Center Auxiliary Heritage Collection, Anchorage; the Anchorage Museum of History and Art, Anchorage; the Alaska State Museum, Juneau; and several private collections. We gratefully acknowledge their generosity. This essay was written by Molly Lee based on the research of Angela J. Linn for her master’s thesis project, which resulted in the exhibition Not Just a Pretty Face. The advisory team for Not Just a Pretty Face included Poldine Carlo, (Athabascan), Martha Demientieff (Alutiiq), Rebecca Etukeok (Tlingit-Inupiaq), Eva Heff le (Inupiaq), Christopher Koonooka, Velma Koontz, and Jonella Larson (all St. Lawrence Island Yupik), Rebecca Peterson (Yup’ik), Glen Simpson (Tahltan Athabascan), Phyllis Morrow (anthropologist), Chase Hensel (anthropologist), and Jean Flanagan Carlo (evaluator). We are grateful to them all for their generosity with time and information. Miniature human ﬁgures are not reported from Old Bering Sea III sites. The figure was deposited at the Peabody Museum at Harvard University and later lost. Only a plaster cast of it remains (Black 2003:20). Dates of the ﬁrst contact between Alaska Natives and Westerners vary depending on the location. One of the earliest was 1741, when Alexei Chirikov encountered the Aleuts in the Aleutian Islands (Black 2004), and the latest was about 1900, when trading posts were established among the more remote groups of Athabascans. Therefore, there is no single date for the beginning of the historic period in Alaska. With this caveat in mind, we use “historic period” here to refer to dolls and human ﬁgurines that were reported or collected between the date of ﬁ rst contact between a Native group and non-Natives and about 1950, when World War II had ended and modernization brought about further changes in doll making. There are some early dolls in the University of Alaska Museum collections whose clothing and/or skin legs may be absent due to deterioration. These may have been made for children but their original purpose is uncertain. In one instance, Nelson found a pair of dolls whose heads and bodies were formed from clay. This ﬁnd, at Razbinsky, on the lower Yukon, still maintained the stylistic characteristics common to this area (Nelson 1899:343). In some parts of the Yukon–Kuskokwim Delta, dolls were complementary to story knives, the fancifully carved ivory knives used to draw pictographs in the mud to illustrate the stories the girls told each other (Himmelheber 1993:28–31). According to Lucy Sparks, who grew up in Chevak, when the ﬁ rst cranes appeared in the spring the girls would wrap up their dolls and take them to an older

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female relative, who would exchange them for the story knives (Hensel 1999). It is generally thought that the strict division of gender roles in Alaska Native cultures (Giffen 1930) discouraged boys from playing with girls’ toys, including dolls. However, Osgood is alone in speciﬁcally saying that boys were discouraged from playing with dolls, in this case among the Deg Hit’an (Osgood 1940:390). Not all charms and amulets were carved to represent human beings. Some were zoomorphic and others biomorphic. According to Ray, charms and amulets differed conceptually but could not necessarily be distinguished visually. Charms directed energy outward beyond the self. Amulets, on the other hand, were invested with power by the wearer or a religious specialist and thought to protect their owner against a speciﬁc type of bad fortune or to bring about good luck of a certain kind (Ray 1977:17). “Numaiyuk,” the spelling formerly considered standard, actually originated with Otto Geist, who was on St. Lawrence in the 1920s; it is based on the English phoneticization of the way the name is pronounced. In the 1960s, Central and Siberian Yupik orthography was standardized such that the name would be spelled “Nemayaq.” This is currently the spelling preferred by Native speakers, according to the Alaska Native Language Center, University of Alaska Fairbanks. There is a possible parallel between fertility ﬁgurines in the Yup’ik region and the sun-worm doll found among the Koryak of northeastern Siberia. Regarded as the guardian of women, the body of this doll is thought to contain a worm (called the “vivifying one,”) that falls from the sky into the woman’s root basket, protecting her from sterility (Serov 1988:249). According to Ray, the human figurines were usually found on the board type of monuments, the distribution of which was mainly restricted to the lower Kuskokwim River. Ray describes one such efﬁgy as a “life-sized man of wood, holding a riﬂe and surrounded by his possessions” (Ray 1981:37; 1982). Osgood also reports the use of a second doll for the purpose of divining good weather among the Deg Hit’an. The small anthropomorphic ﬁgure was made out of wood shavings and carried a sled, which may have been a symbol of putting things in order. The doll was activated by burial (Osgood 1940:422). Between 1842 and 1844, Lt. Zagoskin witnessed what may have been a version of the doll ceremony: “On the bench [in the ceremonial house] stood ﬁ ve nude wooden statues about an arshin [about a foot] in height, with the arm bound in a special way and the legs only indicated by a line. Two of them were female. There was a mask over the face of each of them, and a lamp was burning before each. The Natives danced in turn and then they placed before each statue platters with ﬁsh tolkusha [archaic term, meaning unknown], and other food. As they did this they said: ‘ T his is for you from our supplies, help us to more [sic] in the future.’. . . On the [next morning] when the

Chapter 1

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[ritual steam] bath was over they put the statues away in their old place behind the kazhim and covered them over with birch bark” (Michael 1967:229). In his diary, Moravian missionary John Kilbuck discusses the Moravians’ conﬁ scation of doll festival ﬁgurines and the Yup’ik men’s puzzled and angry reaction. When Kilbuck refused to return them, the men later brought in a bundle of the dolls’ possessions including fur clothing and a miniature drum (Fienup-Riordan 1991:189). Whether this was a gesture acknowledging their defeat or was a way of making sure that the dolls would have what they needed in their new life is unknown. The size of doll festival ﬁgurines is in doubt. Ray (1981:22) describes them as “huge.” Nelson (1899:379) did not witness the event himself and gives no information about the size (Donta 1993:188–189). According to Osgood (1940:423–424), the ﬁgurines for the same Deg Hit’an ceremonies were between seven inches and one foot tall. Ivanov reports that the Aleut also placed small human ﬁgures outside their barabaras (underground houses) to dispel evil (Black 1991). Quar t z was considered to have magical proper ties throughout much of the Eskimo cultural region. According to Weyer: “Small fragments of quartz crystal are [considered to be] the centers of masses of ice that have frozen so hard they become stone. These are prized as amulets” (Weyer 1932:312). The British Navy captain Rochfort Maguire, who spent two years at Barrow from 1852–54, also observed that the local Eskimos wore “large pieces of crystal on their breast” as amulets (Bockstoce 1988:210). Puppets are also reported for the Yup’ik region, although less is known about them (Fienup-Riordan 1996:130). One example, deposited at the Alaska State Museum (catalog number II-A-3070), is illustrated in Ray 1981:188. According to Lowenstein, puguqs depicted stories told in more recent generations whereas quluguluguqs illustrated stories taking place in long-ago mythological times (Lowenstein 1993:117). Puppets and marionettes were used widely along the Arctic Coast. For example, see the ivory puppet from King Island illustrated by Kaplan and Barsness (1986:154, ﬁg. 146). Ray describes three puguqs in the collection of the American Museum of Natural History (Ray 1977:121).

Intimates and Efﬁgies

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According to University of Alaska Museum Ethnology records, the museum acquired this marionette in 1964. Thereafter, the Point Hope people created a new, “almost life-size” example. According to Ivanov, such ﬁ gurines were also placed outside Aleut barabaras to ward off evil spirits (Black 1991). According to Birket-Smith, some shamans practicing at the time of his 1930s ﬁeldwork used Western-made dolls bought at the local store (Birket-Smith and de Laguna 1938:210). Although the introduction of Christianity irrevocably altered the core beliefs of Alaska Native people, certain aspects of indigenous religions were incorporated into Christianity. For example, prayers for the return of game, a cornerstone of most indigenous religions, have been incorporated into Christian church services in rural Alaska today (Hensel 1996:68). Up until the 1960s and 1970s, many children still used cloth play dolls. Although handmade, these are not considered indigenous because they were made of imported fabric. According to Ray, the Russians taught the Aleut and Alutiiq people to craft items such as buckets, berry mashers, and cabinetry (Ray 1981:58). Susan W. Fair offers an alternative explanation for the reduction in horn dolls. She suggests that fewer are made now because the art form is not remunerative enough to be economically viable to the extended family required to produce them (Fair 2006). According to Hedrick and Hedrick (1983:4), Lena Sours of Kotzebue actually made the ﬁ rst wooden-headed doll. The head was carved by Oliver Brown (Nipaloq). According to Eva Hefﬂe, who grew up in Kotzebue, after doll making got going there, Nipaloq carved most of the doll heads for other doll makers, although Ethel apparently always made her own. Wooden-faced dolls from Eek are grooved around the perimeter. According to Fair, this technique goes back to earlier doll construction techniques (Fair 1982:47). Wooden masks from the same region were similarly grooved so that the parka hood could be brought around the face during a dance for a more realistic portrayal (see Fienup-Riordan 1996:296, bottom ﬁg.).

39

Playing for Real Scholarly Perspectives on Alaska Native Play and Ritual Angela J. Linn

As I researched the play dolls in the University of Alaska Museum collection for Not Just a Pretty Face, I began to realize that the category “play” is a general term for a wide array of activities, usually joyous but always vital to the development of children. In this essay I discuss the varied perspectives on play taken by anthropologists and psychologists, with particular attention to those that focus on play dolls. Next, I show how this body of literature is applicable to the analysis of play among Alaska Native children. Finally, I will point out that in some indigenous cultures of Alaska there is a strong link between children’s play and the more formalized play of adults that we call ritual.

2

historian Johan Huizinga, who, in his book Homo Ludens, deﬁned play as: A free activity standing quite consciously outside “ordinary” life as being “not serious,” but at the same time absorbing the player intensely and utterly. It is an activity connected with no material interest, and no proﬁt can be gained by it. It proceeds within its own proper boundaries of time and space according to ﬁ xed rules and in an orderly manner. It promotes the formation of social groupings which tend to surround themselves with secrecy and to stress their difference from the common world by disguise or other means (Huizinga 1950:13).

The Spectrum of Play Fundamental to any scholarly study is a deﬁ nition of its focus. However, nearly a century of combined psychological, sociological, and anthropological research has failed to arrive at a collectively acceptable deﬁ nition of play, much as a generally agreed-upon deﬁ nition of culture has eluded anthropologists. The literature suggests that the deﬁ nitions of play can be thought of as a continuum. At one end are the functionalists, for whom play is simply the opposite of work (e.g., Huizinga 1950). At the other are those who have used neuropsychology to arrive at a largely biological deﬁ nition of the phenomenon (e.g., Parman 1979). Hovering somewhere in between is the perspective of phenomenologists, who argue that play activities are essential to making sense of and learning from experiences (Cameron 1996). Researchers subscribing to the work vs. play distinction have followed the lead of twentieth-century Dutch

Other researchers, such as Caillois (1961), Cohen (1987), and Norbeck (1971), have followed this basic premise, occasionally tailoring it to ﬁt a research aim.1 Most agree that play is a “framed” activity in which one makes a conscious decision to adhere to rules and roles that are in contrast to everyday situations. At the other end of the spectrum are those, such as Parman (1979) and Csikszentmihalyi and Bennett (1971), who deﬁ ne play as a universal biological process. They state that play relieves boredom as well as the complicated worries of everyday life and elicits behavior that allows the player to lose consciousness of self (Csikszentmihalyi and Bennett 1971). Parman sees a direct connection between playing and dreaming, arguing that a common neurophysiological process underlies both. This process arises from the need for disruption of synchrony, something provided internally during sleep, but which occurs during waking hours during institutionalized or noninstitutionalized

41

Figure 48 Through play, children learn social skills that will prepare them for their adult roles. The young boys with their toy guns pretend to be hunters while the young girl in the tent keeps the camp orderly. Frederick Drane Collection, acc. no. 91-046-477, Archives, Alaska and Polar Regions Department, Rasmuson Library, University of Alaska Fairbanks.

play. To function healthily, the nervous system requires changed sensor y input and differentiated neural activity, both of which are achieved during play (Parman 1979). Neuropsychologically then, the capacity for play promotes youthfulness and vitality (Norbeck 1971). This perspective is the basis for the contemporary theory that the need for play continues into adulthood. In between these two extremes is the phenomenological view that play furnishes both children and adults with the ability to synthesize experience (Cameron 1996). From this perspective, children constantly recreate their environment through play, rearranging its components to align with their own notions of the world. According to Lévi-Strauss (1966), the best known of the moderates, play ensures the perpetuation of social patterns and rituals. I argue that this view of play best ﬁts the historical context of Alaska Native cultures.

The Historical Study of Play

Figure 49 Elena Carlo and her Barbie wear matching lightweight cotton parkas. Courtesy of Jean Flanagan Carlo.

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Anthropologists and psychologists have studied play in various ways, most commonly as a medium for revealing the unconscious thoughts and relationships of children, as well as their cognitive development. Early anthropologists saw play from an evolutionary point of view. William Wells Newell, in his Games and Songs of American Children (1903), interpreted games as survivals of the adult activities of earlier societies. The activities of children were thought of as windows to the past. Newell and his followers originated the idea that children’s activities were primitive, frivolous, and unworthy of scientiﬁc study. In the 1920s and 1930s, the heyday of functionalism, theories on children’s play emphasized its imitation of adult behavior. To the functionalists, the sole purpose of play was to socialize children into behavioral norms. While reductive, their notion at least disputed that play was frivolous (Schwartzman 1978:133). At about the same time, culture-and-personality investigators such as Margaret Mead fused anthropology and psychology, using children’s play as a case study of a culturally speciﬁc activity that refuted the idea of universal, biologically based behavior (Schwartzman 1978:207). It was not until the 1940s that investigators incorporated play dolls into their studies of children’s activities. Researchers, especially psychotherapists such as Henry and Henry (1974), used dolls in the treatment of children to elicit unconscious or repressed feelings. Psychologist Jean Piaget published Play, Dreams, and

Chapter 2

Imitation (Piaget 1962), one of the most inﬂuential studies of the subject. Piaget’s main method of research was observing his own three children, and one of his principal contributions to the study of play was his conclusion that children use play dolls and toys for working out daily tensions. Later, Piaget’s ideas were merged with psychoanalytic theory, and eventually his techniques of doll play were applied to the study of children cross-culturally (Schwartzman 1978:150).

Dolls in Play and Ritual in Alaska Native Cultures Anthropological, psychological, and folkloric studies of play are helpful in analyzing uses and contexts of Alaska Native dolls. Westerners tend to think of dolls in connection with little girls playing house, where the doll functions as a pretend baby. But other cultures (Cameron 1996:20) distinguish beween doll functions in play and ritual. In this book, we distinguish between the ﬁgures used by children, or “play dolls,” and those used by adults in ritual and ceremony, or “human ﬁgurines.”2 One instance where the scholarly literature can help with the interpretation of Alaska Native children’s play activities during the early historic period is in addressing the question of whether playing with dolls was a gendered activity. The ethnographic record rarely makes clear whether the play habits of boys and girls were the same or different. However, given the strict division of labor between men and women in Eskimo culture generally (Giffen 1930), it can be assumed that for the most part it was girls who played with dolls. Functional analysis suggests an explanation. If boys grew up to be hunters, it should follow that their play focused on miniature bows and arrows, halibut hooks, or harpoons. Likewise, the expectation of Alaska Native girls was that they grew up to be mothers, seamstresses, and homemakers. Thus, we would expect their toys to be miniature cooking and sewing implements, women’s knives, and play dolls. That play is preparation for ritual activity in Alaska is also suggested by the literature. This is illustrated in the distinctions that Alaska Eskimos, Tlingit Indians, and possibly, the Aleuts and Alutiiqs made between dolls and puppets. In these groups, dolls were considered miniature people, and children played with them in specially constructed imaginary worlds that required no separate audience. Puppets, on the other hand, could represent people as well as animals or mythical beings, and they were used in ritual performance (Cameron 1996:13). This distinction can be seen in

Playing for Real

Figure 50. These young boys are practicing their hunting skills with slingshots. Alaskan Sheperd Collection, acc. no. 88-117-42N, Archives, Alaska and Polar Regions Department, Rasmuson Library, University of Alaska Fairbanks.

the Inupiaq village of Point Hope, where puppets and marionettes were used in the annual fall ceremonies3 to give thanks to the spirits for the return of the whales (see Linn and Lee this volume). These models were not children’s toys; they played a critical role in adult ritual performance. Piaget’s studies provide insights into the play-as-practice activities of Alaska Native children. Young girls on St. Lawrence Island used walrus mandibles as dolls (and wooden “yoke dolls” that replicated the shape of a walrus mandible) in order to practice packing a baby on their shoulders. Practicing for an adult role allowed the girls to acquire the understanding that miniatures stand for real objects and that they can be used similarly (Cohen 1987:51). According to Piaget, this understanding is part of the cognitive development of childhood, enabling children to make sense of the world around them. Piaget found that once children could create complicated play situations, such as emulating motherhood, play activities enabled them to begin the process of coping with future reality (Cohen 1987:44). From Piaget’s perspective, when E.W. Nelson walked into a house on Sledge Island and saw that two small girls had “placed their dolls standing in a semicircle before us upon the ﬂoor, while they sat quietly behind us as though permitting their dolls to take a look at the strangers” (Nelson 1899:345), he may have witnessed such an event. These girls, who probably had not seen many white men before, were most likely

43

Figure 51. School Children— Alatna. The girls are holding Native dolls while the boys hold miniature bows and arrows, fish traps, and a toy gun. One boy holds a doll and possibly a push-top. As a rule, girls and boys were encouraged to play with different toys. Tishu Ulen Collection, acc. no. 89-88-64N, Archives, Alaska and Polar Regions Department, Rasmuson Library, University of Alaska Fairbanks.

using their dolls to assess the strangers, thus diminishing their apprehension. Studies published in the 1960s, which demonstrated the utility of play in the development of creativity, would be applicable to the Alaskan case. Lieberman, for instance, found that children who were encouraged to play exhibited “divergent-thinking abilities, ideational ﬂuency, spontaneous ﬂexibility, and originality” (Schwartzman 1978:322). This conclusion sheds light on the connection in Alaska between play and ritual activities and also suggests the importance of creative thinking in a harsh environment where imaginative solutions to critical problems could make the difference between life and death.

Figure 52. Cup’ik shaman Utuan, Chevak, ca. 1928. Also known as Kangciurluq, some of this shaman’s exploits are described in Thomas Moses’ stor y “Angalkull-ret/The Old Shamans.” Courtesy of Jesuit Oregon Province Archives, Gonzaga University, image no. 267-167.

44

Piaget’s play-as-practice theories also help us to understand how ever yday interactions with dolls prepared Alaska Native children for the use of human ﬁgurines in adult rituals and ceremony. Before the arrival of Christian missionaries, shamans, the medical-religious practitioners 4 common to all Alaska Native groups, often incorporated human ﬁgurines into their practices. Some of the main uses were in curing ceremonies, to treat infertility, and for divination. Both written and oral sources make clear that these ﬁgurines could assume living form and take on the role of a shaman’s helper. Figurines were used to bring about good or evil. During curing ceremonies, for example, the helping spirits residing in the ﬁgurine moved to the afﬂ icted person, driving out the evil spirits5 believed to be the cause of illness. At other times, the shaman could use his familiar to cause evil, like the death of a child. So strong was the fear that a doll could come alive that it continues to haunt some Alaska Native elders today.6 They recall the days when shamans regulated their lives, and the possibility that a human ﬁgurine could act on behalf of a shaman persists among some of them. For this reason, elders sometimes shy away from dolls that appear too lifelike. Recently, Chevak doll maker Earl Atchak made a doll that, according to elders, bore an eerie resemblance to an early-twentieth century shaman (Fig. 52). Because of the resemblance, the elders worried that the ﬁgurine might also be capable of springing to life. This suggests that old beliefs

Chapter 2

sometimes persist even though most Alaska Native people today are Christians. According to Parman (1979) play is a controlled deviation from normalcy, and its contrast serves to strengthen the rules of everyday life. This is illustrated in the Alaskan case. Among the Yup’ik Eskimos, doll play was permitted all year long, but only allowed outside in summer after the return of the geese. If a girl ignored this prohibition, the snow would not melt, the animals would not return, and the village would be unable to participate in summer subsistence activities. Such conventions taught Alaska Native children the necessity of observing rituals of the annual cycle. Seasonal appropriateness persisted in the ritual activities of adults. For example, every winter the Yup’ik people held a ceremony known as the Bladder Festival, which ensured that the animals would return. Failure to perform the ceremony could result in widespread famine. In addition to their role in the socialization of young girls, dolls also served as markers of the transition between their childhood and adulthood. Families of Yup’ik girls marked the occasion of their daughters’ ﬁ rst menstruation by holding a feast, during which the girl gave away her dolls. The practice was also reported for the Yakutat Tlingit,7 who held a potlatch for this purpose (de Laguna 1972:520). The division of labor between genders is also reinforced by corresponding differences between girls’ and boys’ toys. There is little evidence that young Alaska Native boys played with dolls. Possibly, there was some cultural avoidance of dolls by males because they marked female rites of passage.8

Theories on Play and Ritual In light of the examples above, it is clear that the activities of play and ritual in Alaska Native cultures are connected in ways that have not been previously investigated. In Western culture this is not a new concept. According to Plato: What, then, is the right way of living? Life must be lived as play, playing certain games, making sacriﬁces, singing and dancing, and then a man will be able to propitiate the gods, and defend himself against his enemies, and win in the contest (quoted in Huizinga 1950:17–19).

Playing for Real

Structurally, play and ritual share many features. Both create a reality outside of the ordinary time and space. They are parallel states of existence, different only by the age of the participants. According to Cameron, “Children re-create the adult world through play and bring continuity to the real world; adults cause change in the real world through serious ritual play” (Cameron 1996:26–27). In the Alaskan context, children play with dolls as a way of learning about the world around them. Dolls can act as a projection of the child’s personality. The manipulation of play dolls can invest children with the ability to control their circumstances. They help develop creative thinking skills and furnish the means for learning about adult roles. Ritual uses of human ﬁgurines also allow for the projection of one’s self, under the guise of sympathetic magic as seen in the Point Hope ceremony with the whaling crew (see Linn and Lee this volume). By showing the successful hunt of the whale model, adults attempt to manipulate and control their realities. Shamans contributed to the well being of the community when they used a human ﬁgurine as a vehicle for curing. In the Doll Festival of the lower Yukon, the shaman used human ﬁgurines to foretell the abundance of game. Ultimately, the correspondence between play and ritual is close indeed. Play asks the performers to “make believe” while ritual asks them to “believe” (Lavenda 1996:938).

Conclusion Play dolls in Alaska Native cultures performed as vital a role in the lives of children as human ﬁgurines did for adults. When attempting to arrive at a deﬁ nition of play, early psychologists discounted these activities as insigniﬁcant, but in Alaska Native cultures, as elsewhere, play and ritual are equally necessary. Functionalists argue that playing with dolls teaches young girls—and the boys who watched them—about the culturally appropriate roles of behavior. From the point of view of developmental psychology, play promotes cognitive growth, enhancing creativity and critical thinking skills as well as physical dexterity. Through playing with dolls Alaska Native children were able to gain control over compelling aspects of their lives, which promoted the growth of self-conﬁdence. These various factors helped the child grow into an adult who could readily accept the use of human ﬁgurines for rituals.

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Notes 1

2

3

46

Some oppose this definition. Anthropologist Helen Schwartzman argues that play is not always fun, that games do not encourage spontaneity, and that play is not always unproductive. She also challenges the notion that play must occur in a separate space and time. To her, play is a mode of existence, rather than a phase, which can come any time, any place (Schwartzman 1978:327–328). Games are deﬁ ned differently from play. They tend to be more formalized. They have deﬁnite rules, ﬁ xed sequences of action, and uncertain outcomes (Cheska 1979). In contrast, play is more casual. Schwartzman shows that energetic play is connected to creativity, and that if play activities are permitted at work, they may result in higher productivity. Schwartzman also argues that children’s play contributes to a child’s emotional, social, and cognitive development (Schwartzman 1978:327–328). Studies have shown that if boys are permitted dolls they play differently with them. A girl usually pretends that she is grown up, and the doll is her baby. Boys tend to project their personas into the ﬁgure and to assume the adult role of warrior, hero, or villain (Cameron 1996:20). Both Rasmussen (1927) and Rainey (1947) witnessed this ceremony. It was a type of thanksgiving festival in which

4

5

6

7

8

the miniature umiak crew, led by the umialik, paddled their oars and breathed with the assistance of sinew lines and gut breathing tubes. In many Alaska Native cultures, it was thought that illnesses were caused by the penetration of an evil spirit into the body of the afﬂ icted. Shamans were responsible for restoring good health by removing such spirits. Speciﬁc examples of this method of treatment can be seen in Birket-Smith and de Laguna (1938). This fear was shared by Westerners of earlier times. According to Ariès, in the Middle Ages “the doll was . . . the dangerous instrument of the magician and the witch” (Ariès 1962:69). Cultural anthropologist Phyllis Morrow has hypothesized that giving up dolls at puberty could be the result of the dolls’ perceived roles as symbolic children. Once the girl was physically able to have a real child, her symbolic child was no longer needed. Morrow’s hypothesis of the correspondence between dolls and symbolic babies stands up in the Tlingit case. The Tlingit word for a doll, sik, translates as “little daughter” (de Laguna 1972:515). I have only seen one Alaska Native boy playing with a doll, and that was in a historical photograph.

Chapter 2

Everything Old Is New Again Interviewing Alaska Native Doll Makers Chase Hensel

In preparing a video to accompany this exhibit, I had the opportunity to interview twelve Alaska Native doll makers during craft sales at the Fur Rendezvous in Anchorage, the Festival of Native Arts in Fairbanks, and in their homes. The interviews were exciting and wide-ranging, covering a variety of topics relating to doll making. In order to preserve the ﬂavor of these interviews, I tried to let the doll makers speak for themselves, grouping quotes under topics and stitching them together with brief comments of my own.1 The doll makers I interviewed included Dora Buchea (St. Lawrence Island Yupik), Rosalie Bunyan-Serovy (Yup’ik), Denise Hardesty (Koyukon Athabascan), Eva Hefﬂe (Inupiaq), Alice Johnnie (Tlingit), Ruth Koweluk (Inupiaq), Walton Irrigoo (St. Lawrence Island Yupik), Iva and Ken Lisbourne (Inupiaq), Carolyn Kava Penayah (St. Lawrence Island Yupik), Jackie Schoppert (Tlingit), and Lillian Tetpon (Inupiaq). Denise Hardesty, like other Alaska Native doll makers, makes old things new. She is an innovator, inventing beaded sun catchers one spring when she wanted stained glass in her window. She also recycles materials, giving old things new lives. She has created many Athabascan dolls based on historic photographs. In conversation, she suggested that as long as there is documentation and preservation, the objects in archives and collections are not dead, but only resting, ready to be brought back to life and be reincorporated into contemporary traditions. For example: Denise Hardesty: One of the things I’ve been thinking about the past couple of years is nobody has made any crocheted rabbit skin clothes in 40 years, that I know of. I have never even seen one, and I do want to come up there to the museum and see what

3

Denise Hardesty Koyukon Athabascan—Fairbanks Now living in Fairbanks

you have. I have 30 rabbit skins, and I’m going to make two great big balls of rabbit skin yarn and give one to my mom and one to my cousin, and tell them, “Here, make something.” It’s just like everything old can be new again. All you’ve got to do is look for it. Finally, she suggests that making doll clothing based on the clothes she has studied in historic photographs is a way of understanding the past as well: Denise Hardesty: You see them [people] in their pictures. They took what they thought were the ﬁner things from both their cultures and dress themselves up in nice, good, solid White man’s clothes. But they just had to have the [beaded] boots, the mittens, the baby strap or whatever that was better than they could buy down at the store. . . . People are just the same. They just want to be respected and held in high esteem, and that was what the big deal was with all the fancy clothes.

47

Dora Buchea St. Lawrence Island Yupik Now living in Slana

Ken and Iva Lisbourne Inupiaq—Point Hope Now living in Tok

How Did You Learn To Make Dolls? Most doll makers learned from two or more teachers. For women, one of these was generally the doll maker’s grandmother, or sometimes her mother, aunt, or great aunt. For men, these teachers were usually grandfathers or fathers. The second might have been another, perhaps more judgmental relative, or a teacher in school. For example, Dora Buchea said she learned: Dora Buchea: From my grandma, mostly. My grandmother was very patient, not my mother. Don’t let her know that. My grandma was very patient, and she points them [mistakes] out. I think she ﬁgures that if she takes them apart for us to redo that we might get discouraged. She always just lets us ﬁ nish, since it’s our own toys. We didn’t have very much toys when we were growing up, so we just made our own.

long line of doll makers, too. I don’t know if you know Annie Alowa. She’s my father’s sister. So I kind of got the thing from her, because we never really quite got along, until I got good. She was always telling me, “You did this wrong,” and I’d get mad, so I tried to improve mine better than hers, and I end up making it pretty good. But I think she was my inspiration because we argued about, something looked bad, she’d tell me, and I’d get mad at her because I was just learning. But she did a lot for me, I feel.

Elsewhere, however, she uses different terms to describe how she learned: Dora Buchea: When I was a little girl, I was hyper. That was my punishment, to sit there and make doll clothes for my aunts. Just Barbie dolls, after Barbie dolls came. I had fancy Barbie doll clothes. . . . I came from a

Caroline Kava Penayah describes the central position of watching, visually attending, as well as doing hands-on work: Caroline Kava Penayah: My grandmother was a doll maker and so was my mother. They didn’t sit down and teach us. We [were] just watching them, they’re doing it, we just keep up with [what they’re doing], but she taught me the stitches a lot, which I didn’t like it. When you were younger, you don’t want to [work], but I loved to visit her. . . . When I walked in, open the door, she was doing something. No way I can run away or hide. I have to do what she’s just handed to me.

Caroline Kava Penayah St. Lawrence Island Yupik Now living in Anchorage

Walton Irrigoo St. Lawrence Island Yupik Now living in Anchorage

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Chapter 3

Alice Johnnie Tlingit—Juneau Now living in Juneau

Eva Hefﬂe Inupiaq—Kotzebue Now living in North Pole

Iva Lisbourne describes her early apprenticeship and her search for technical advice as an adult: Iva Lisbourne: I learn from my mother, because I used to thread her needles and stuff and watch her sometimes. But I’m still learning. I still got a lot of things to learn. And I have my father help me too. Because mama, she’s gone. I don’t have any [living close female relatives]—sisters are gone, so I ask for help a lot. And I’m still learning a lot.

and she said, “Oh, that’s pretty. That’s pretty,” she said. I knew there was something wrong when she said that. Otherwise, she wouldn’t have said that was good. Then just before I walked out, she said, “You put it upside down, but it’s all right.” I had to undo it again. Jackie Schoppert: Well, she [her grandmother] insisted on accuracy, for one thing. We had to be accurate in anything we depicted . . . in our sewing. I remember having her rip out a seam. I’d just sew along, and then I’d get to the end and tie the knot, and she’d rip it out because it wasn’t perfectly straight. We had to learn the basics ﬁ rst before we could do anything else. I remember hours of just sewing one line or one seam just on a piece of cotton, and when I got to the end I just knew she was going to tear it out. . . . It was so boring, but we couldn’t say it was boring. That word didn’t exist in our vocabulary. We couldn’t even roll our eyes like that.

Often this early learning involved redoing something several times until it was done to acceptable standards: Walton Irrigoo: My dad taught me. I started carving when I was about 12 years old. And he started me off with small ﬁgurines, owls, and seals. And as I got a little older and, of course, my skills advanced, he started teaching me some of the other artwork that we do: kayaks, animal ﬁgurines, polar bears. You didn’t see any in my display case because we sold out the ﬁ rst day, of my carvings anyway. And from there I kind of went off on my own and started producing my own things. When he was teaching me how to do the kayaks . . . the little men that sit in the kayaks, I made ﬁve or six before he ﬁ nally let me put one of those men on my kayak. . . . I’d go and show him one, and he’d look at it and he goes, “Well, you’re going to have to do another one.” And he’d just toss it. And so I’d have to go and make another one. And then that’s how I learned. Alice Johnnie: I learned that from my grandmother. Before she passed away, she told me to pick that up. Of course, when you ﬁ rst do something, I had put it together backwards, but she said, “It’s all right, it’s all right,” . . . It made me feel good. . . . The border on there [the blanket], I had it upside down like that, and I put, I think it was an eagle. I put it up here, and I showed it to my grandmother. I said, “How did I do, Grandma?” I used my own Tlingit word,

Everything Old Is New Again

Sometimes the doll makers’ early teaching was less than successful. Eva Hefﬂe notes: Eva Hefﬂe: Well, I wasn’t too good at sewing. I never was. That’s why I surprise everybody. Growing up, Lena Sours [Eva’s great aunt] was the teacher, teaching us kids how to sew at the school, and I remember while the other girls were making mukluks, I was making mittens. I just have to sew the outside of it. I can’t remember how she had [arranged it], but the simplest thing, I couldn’t even do that right. So she had me making thread out of caribou tendon. I got all tangled on that, and she was so disgusted with me. I just couldn’t sew, so I never picked up sewing again. When I tried to learn, my grandmother, Mary Curtis, would chase me away, because she’d say I’m going to lose her needles and her beads. Then she seen my dolls, and she was so sorry, because she made them beautiful show parkas with the wolverine tassels and stuff. She looked at my

49

Figure 53. Two of Denise Hardesty’s dolls are on the far left. The striped material on the doll to the left is old pillow ticking that Denise remembered her father using when she was a child. In this group of dolls are Athabascan, Northwest Coast, and Aleut dolls. Left to right: William Paul, Koyukon Athabascan, maker: Denise Hardesty, 26.7 cm, UA93-003-0003AC; trapper, Koyukon Athabascan, maker: Denise Hardesty, 27.3 cm, UA93-003-0004; male and female dolls, Ahtna Athabascan, maker: Doris Charles, 26.6 x 13, UA94-003-0001AC, 27 x 15, UA94-003-0002AC; two

male dolls, Athabascan, maker: Laura Alfred, 31.5 x 14, UA72011-0001, 32 x 15, UA72-072-0001; Tlingit crest doll, maker: Annie Lawrence, 25.5 x 16, UA69-050-0006A; doll, Tlingit, maker: Mabel Pike, 25.5 x 13.5, UA84-003-0062; male in kamleika (gut parka), Aleut, maker: Sophie Pletnikoff, 26 x 13, UA70-0510029B; female in long parka, Aleut, maker: Sophie Pletnikoff, 23 x 10.5, UA70-051-0029A; male dolls, Aleut, maker: Hartina Savaroff, 29.2 x 8.9, UA81-003-0178, 0179.

work, and she said, “I should have showed you.” By then she was pretty old, and all she could work on up until her death, 90 some years old, was yo-yos.

While most doll makers learned primarily from relatives, Ken Lisbourne thinks that being technically schooled in ﬁne arts and Native arts was also vital to his profession as a Native artist: Ken Lisbourne: I feel when I studied art, after being able to go to school for it and having some of the ﬁ nest teachers like when I was very young in Point Hope . . . Andrew Tooyak, Sr., was one of my ﬁ rst teachers in ivory carving. My father was also one of my ﬁ rst teachers. But later on, my high school years, I decided I was very interested to get into an art school. That’s when [I went to the Institute of American Indian Arts] in Santa Fe, which was all Native arts, which you can take every day for classes. You had great teachers like Henry Tubis for painting, which was oil, acrylics, or watercolor. Sculpture teacher Allan Houser, who taught my sculpture, and ceramics was a lady named Linda

However, perhaps she had learned more about sewing than she knew: Eva Hefﬂe: My ﬁ rst doll took me two weeks, maybe more. It’s been a long time. But that ﬁ rst doll didn’t even have arms. I sewed the sleeves together, because I didn’t know how to put on arms, and the mukluks were like them old Lapland shoes that curl up. [Laughs.] I forgot to put the strip between the mukluk top and the bottom part of the mukluk. Without it, it’s just a real skinny, long thing. Oh, I had a time with my ﬁ rst doll. But it had a wooden head. I don’t know who made it, but my grandma sent me some dry ﬁsh, and there were two of them in there, so that’s how I started.

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Chapter 3

Lillian Tetpon Inupiaq—Marys Igloo Now living in Anchorage

Larson, who taught us the way to work with ceramics. And I think I just connected my way of work along with my style of Native art and my schooling … both connected. But art school is very important [for the] work. You have to go to school to be able to produce better in this day and age. So I think that the most important thing is to go to school and stay in school. If you’re becoming a Native artist, you do need to go to school.

“Each Time I Remember, I Make a Doll”: Making Meaning by Making Dolls Making dolls is both deeply personal and deeply cultural. One part-time doll maker stressed the importance of a positive social environment when working: Jackie Schoppert: The way I was trained in regalia making is if there’s any contention, anything negative around, then you have to put the work down. You can’t work on it. . . . So when I work on weaving, or carving, or making jewelry, or working on the dolls, or whatever it is I’m doing, I block out anything that is negative, and if there’s something negative coming into the house—my kids are screaming, whatever—it gets put down. I won’t touch it. I will not touch it because what if some little girl sees this, and my kids have been screaming their heads off, then that negative energy goes into that. This is how I believe. Maybe no one else in the room [the three non-Native interviewers present] believes it, but this is what I believe. Then that little girl or little boy is going to want that doll, and they’re going to pick it up. . . . What we work on is sacred, and if we keep that in mind as we’re working, and if more of us did that, probably we would not have the problems that we have in the world. It starts with one drop in the ocean, just that one drop or that one whisper.

Everything Old Is New Again

Eva Hefﬂe came to recognize that doll making not only put her in closer touch with her Native culture, it actually helped a vital part of that culture to continue: Eva Hefﬂe: I do enjoy doing the dolls. The reason is I’m trying to keep our culture alive through my dolls, if I could. Some day, if I’m dead and gone, the kids that haven’t learned it in school can look at my dolls, and they’ll sew. That’s what we do. When I go to the schools, I tell them we take pride in what we do because we have survived this country. We just didn’t go to the store and buy something. Every culture, even your people at one time, had to make their own stuff. And in this cold country, the people survived. The Inupiat survived. . . . Way back, I was so busy trying to learn, it never occurred to me that I’m doing my culture. But then after I started doing it, I started thinking, this could preserve the culture, because [some of it is] getting lost. Each time I remember, I make a doll. It wasn’t just automatic [that] I knew my culture, because I’d forgotten a lot of it. A lot of times I go to Kotzebue, and I say, “Oh, I remember my grandma doing that.” So I put it mentally in my mind. Then when I come home I’ll remember it, and I’ll make the doll. Lillian Tetpon said she uses dolls in connection with stories to keep her culture alive: Lillian Tetpon: That’s how I feel too. So I make sure that I make dolls for my grandchildren, and I tell stories about how I was brought up because I want them to know. At ﬁrst, Alice Johnnie stated that she did not see doll making as an activity for cultural survival: Alice Johnnie: You know, I really don’t think of it that way [as keeping Tlingit culture alive]. I really don’t, because I didn’t grow up in [a Tlingit household] at all. I was an orphan, so I was passed to different people, and I grew up in a Catholic school, a Catholic mission. I really don’t even know the story of our history. My mother died while I was still a baby. My dad didn’t spend much time with us, and my grandmother was too old to take care of us, so I was sent away. What I learned, a very little bit, is from my husband. My husband is a chief, so I always listen to him. Soon, however, she began to discuss how she embroiders dolls with the appropriate symbols of moiety and clan. All Tlingits belong to either the Raven or Eagle moiety. Each moiety is subdivided into clans such as Killer Whale and Frog: Alice Johnnie: What I do is I put two different clan [symbols on the button robe] I put the killer whale on

51

Figure 54. Doll maker Eva Hefﬂ e has created activity dolls for many years. She also makes entire dioramas that incorporate many individual activities and combines them. Here she has recre-

ated a scene in a gut-covered tent with ﬁ ve separate dolls, each involved in making clothing and preparing food. 31 x 47 x 43, UA81-003-0145.

the top, and I put eagle below it so the people will know that they’re eagles [eagle moiety, killer whale clan]. When I sew frog, I put the frog on the blanket all by itself, but I tell the people which tribe [moiety] it is. I don’t show the whole body, just the head part, and I put eagle there because that’s an eagle tribe. Leonard Kamerling: So do people buy the dolls of their clan? Alice Johnnie: Yeah, they do. Like today, this [person said] “I’m not there.” [There’s no doll with my moiety and clan symbols.] I told them that, well, it was there. It’s all bought.

black dot here on each face. The reason was that we had this daughter, and she’s 16 years old now. She had this beauty mark that showed up and that’s the reason why this is put on them, as our trademark. Dora Buchea: There’s two dots. Cerene [her college-age daughter] has those two beauty marks. That’s been my trademark since I do females. Ever since she was born, I’ve been putting them on. But then she had them removed. I was mad at her. I said, “You took my trademark away.” But what she didn’t know is [that] those moles, if she stayed out in the sun, they come back. They came back but lighter. I laugh at her. I said, “See.”

Another item of interest for doll makers was whether or not the dolls they make look like someone and if this resemblance is intentional or accidental. Two doll makers said that they mark the faces of some of their dolls with the beauty marks that occur on their own daughters’ faces: Ken Lisbourne: There’s one thing about the doll is this beauty mark. It’s always a trademark. This little

52

Many of the doll makers had dolls that ended up looking like people they knew, often family members. In retrospect, some wish that these dolls had been saved instead of sold: Dora Buchea: A few times I made dolls that looked just like my cousins. So I named them after my cousins, but I bet they’d be mad if they knew.

Chapter 3

know how many years, I never knew him. So to me he [Burton Sours] was my grandpa, because them sisters would go camping, and he’d always be there, when we were getting ﬁsh.… He passed away. I didn’t have any money, or the kids were small. I couldn’t just up and leave them, because their dad was working. I wanted to go [to the funeral] because he was just like my own grandpa. . . . I started making a doll, thinking about him, and that doll was sitting down. Grandpa had salt and pepper hair that kind of stuck up. . . . I remember I was making that doll, and thinking about him. That doll came out looking just like him whittling on [something]. He used to do that when he was making us kids toys, and there’s nothing else to do. I’ve never made it since, and it looks just like him. I was going to keep the doll, and it got sold while I wasn’t home. (Laughs.) I was going to keep the one of my grandfather, because, I tell you, I looked at that doll, and it looked just like him, and I automatically made a doll like Aglavialuuraq [Burton Sours]. That’s his name. And then it was the ﬁ rst one sold.

Ken Lisbourne: Over the years when I’d carve each face for her [his wife Iva Lisbourne], I’ve always thought of my relatives and her relatives when we’d produce the grandma doll, the mother doll, the father, or the grandpa. Each face always turn out to be some person here. Iva Lisbourne: He makes a face look just like my mother. I wish I had kept that. I should have just let him make another one [that] looks like my mom. Ruth Koweluk: Sometimes I laugh. . . . Last year, somebody from St. Lawrence Island said this looked like someone at home. Boy, they were really laughing. We just make them any old way, so they look like someone. Caroline Kava Penayah: I started out [making] my little sister’s face. . . . And then I changed for different people when I see their face I like. Just looking at them and get home and try to do it. And one doll I tried to make Barbara Walters. I guess [it is] unique, but that’s my little secret. Denise Hardesty: One of my favorites was this . . . dog musher, and he could have been from back in the forties. He just had a blue canvas pullover and a traditional marten [fur] trapper hat . . . and beautiful mittens. The mittens took me about a week just to bead . . . because I used really, really tiny beads. . . . But I never told anybody until recently that after I got done, I thought that looks like Marvin Kokrine, and all the girls like Marvin. I put three tails on his hat because I knew he wasn’t married yet. Usually, unmarried men, if they were looking for a wife, they would put three tails on there, so everybody would know that he was looking. I’ll have to tell Marvin about that. Eva Hefﬂe: In the sixties, Lena Sours’ husband died, and that’s my grandma’s sister. Because my grandpa had been dead since I was a little girl, probably; I don’t

One doll maker talked about her concern that her dolls not look too much like people she knows. Another shared her fears that sometimes they already are too life-like: Denise Hardesty: A lot of [dolls] would start looking too much like people that I know, and so I never ever painted their faces in.… It might be too much like a voodoo doll or something. It just bothered me. I just couldn’t do it. The cottonwood bark was scary enough, just because of the way the grain [looked]. A lot of people who have been out in the elements a lot of years, they just get that look. Rosalie Bunyan-Serovy: Rosalie [Paniyak] told me that when she made a whole bunch of dolls a long time ago, she was by herself, and she said that she was afraid

Rosalie Bunyan-Serovy Yup’ik—Hooper Bay Now living in Glennallen

Ruth Koweluk Inupiaq—Wales Now living in Anchorage

Everything Old Is New Again

53

of her dolls because she thought that they would come to life. I said, “Oh, yeah?” Because I never told anybody either, [but] I thought the same thing, too. Another doll maker also talked about how the clothing of each doll she made reﬂected how she felt as she was working on it: Dora Buchea: When I make each doll it’s different all the time because I make it the way I want to be dressed that day. Sometimes you have lots of tails and beads, other times when I feel like a real worker it’s just kind of plain.

The Economic Side of Native Doll Making Many doll makers talked about the economics of doll making. One doll maker shared childhood memories of making and selling dolls to tourists: Alice Johnnie: I remember when we were real small, my sister and I. We [lived in] a ﬁsh cannery. When the tourists comes, we used to go out on the porch and put all our little stuff on a little towel. Of course, we didn’t know how much we were supposed to be selling. Some of them, we were selling it for ﬁve cents, ten cents, and a quarter. We thought a quarter was real big money. I was seven years old, and my sister was a little bit younger than me, and that’s how I got started. Another doll maker talked about how she got started: Rosalie Bunyan-Serovy: When I started making dolls in early 1980, I started off—when I won some money at bingo. I invested all of it into materials like leather, ivory, furs, and sealskins. A third doll maker stressed the economic primacy of doll making when she was growing up on the Seward Peninsula in Western Alaska: Leonard Kamerling: When you were a kid growing up in Wales, did you see other dolls around? Were there women making dolls then? Ruth Koweluk: Everybody sews. That’s the only income we have. When the health boat come, we sell, and the mail boat come once a month. When the North Star [the annual supply ship] come, they [the crew] go to town and like to buy stuff to take home. Some of them bring fabric to trade. Some stuff they bring to trade like watch and stuff. We always take the money so we could order from Sears Roebuck.

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For Lillian Tetpon, learning early on that sewing was economically viable crystallized a career choice for her: Lillian Tetpon: Oh, I learned from my mother at Marys Igloo, watching her. And I used to watch her when she made ivory faces and her dolls. Me and my sisters helped her when she sewed. So it was a learning process just to be around her. So I made up my mind that when I had children, I would learn how to sew also and make a living out of it. I’ve been sewing for about 33 years. Rosalie Bunyan-Serovy: This is what I do for a living. This is my way of making a living. Ruth Koweluk talked about how doll making has been a path to an easier life: Ruth Koweluk: I do lot of hard work when I was a child. I’d dream I was going to go where it’s easier to live. Betterment of living. C h a s e He n s e l : A nd d id you f i nd t hat i n Anchorage? Ruth Koweluk: I still go home and see my sister in Wales, and my other relatives in Nome. I sew away from home, get lots done. I do beadwork when I’m in Hawai’i. It’s nice and bright [on the] balcony or on the beach. We get to know people. We sew. Sit on the beach under the tree behind Sheraton Hotel. . . . It’s just fun. If we get tired, we get out into the ocean and swim. Lillian Tetpon raised the issue of producing dolls in quantity to meet the market demand. Elsewhere she says that: Lillian Tetpon: I think my grandmother’s parkas were all done by hand, and my dolls that I make are made real, real fast. They would be satisﬁed with one doll where I want a dozen. So I work on the one pattern, so that would be the difference. . . . When my grandmother made the dolls, they had real hair. I don’t know where they got the hair, but they got it. They did their real black and white [pieced calfskin] trimming for their parkas that I don’t have the time to do. Mine are very simple. Other doll makers shared her concerns: Ken Lisbourne: Our ancestors always had produced the best Native arts like I said. Today’s Native arts are done with better tools but they’re made so fast these days, they’re not producing the best type of work. I think it’s due to the demand of the crafts. It’s how you have to ﬁ nd ways to go faster, quicker. The quicker, the better. And it just produces more money.

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Iva Lisbourne: There are times when he [Ken Lisbourne] tried to hurry. He doesn’t make good faces. I said, “I work so hard on these. I wanted a nice face.” Ken would do them over. Otherwise, if I didn’t say [anything], they would have funny little face, because he tried to rush. Because I remember my father always told my mom, “If you’re going do that, do it right. Try to do it right. Don’t do it pimaqluktuq.” Ken Lisbourne: Pimaqluktuq means don’t do it the wrong way. Dora Buchea: When I did it, it was a hobby, you ﬁ nish one doll, and you look at it, it’d look like so and so. But a lot of times when you’re doing it as a business, you don’t see that part of it anymore, which is real sad. That’s what I’d tell Cerene, “You go to school. You don’t need to be a seamstress. Because your hands get ugly.” Doll makers also talked about concerns about getting properly compensated for their time, particularly for highly detailed work. Lillian Tetpon: One of the problems that we have here in Anchorage is that—even in a show like this that we’re having here (Fur Rendezvous)—is that if you do real intricate work, you want to know if you can get the full price for your dolls, but that’s not the way that it is anymore. Dora Buchea: Then I made the third one but that one takes long time. She’s carrying water, buckets, carrying water with a yoke. . . . I think I made her three times and quit because I’m not very good basket weaver. Takes me long time to make them so I just kind of quit because I end up throwing those little buckets across the room so many times. Because if you’re a skin sewer, you’re [keeping the thread] pulled tight. Then the grass just breaks when you [do], so you have to take the whole thing off and redo it again. Maybe I’ll start making my buckets with sealskin. It might be quicker.

for love, but not for money because it’s too icky and messy, but I know how. Once I make it [an artwork], unless I have another idea that I can change a little bit and make it a little different, I may not ever make one again. There’s people who know me who’ve got orders that have been on layaway for ﬁve–six years, and I say, “Well, if I make another one, it’s yours.” Doll makers also talked about how the cost of materials affected pricing: Walton Irrigoo: Actually, I carve the head and the hands. The majority of the dolls that we make are cedar, and that puts them in the affordable range where people can purchase. But the other dolls that we make are the collectors’ version, and they have the ivory head

Figure 55. Alice Johnnie makes dolls to represent the clans and moieties of the Tlingit of southeast Alaska. She sews beads onto felt to illustrate crest symbols. 29 x 14.5; doll courtesy of Mary Ellen Frank. Photo by Barry J. McWayne.

In counterpoint, there was one doll maker (not employed full time as a artist) who described herself as “spoiled rotten” in that she only made what she wanted to: Denise Hardesty: The economic thing is—it’s like the more I need money, the less I can work. If I get ﬁred up over something . . . it’s just the need to do something. The cultural part comes from the fact that I think I’m a raven, and anything I can scavenge up for free is mine. I’ve got birch. People come to me if they need birch bark. I got caribou hair dyed for tufting already . . . and I’ve taught quite a few women here in the Interior how to do tufting. I don’t do it myself. I might do it

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and ivory hands. I put the scrimshaw [of the traditional St. Lawrence Island tattoos] on the face and on the hands. . . . They’re [the collectors’ version], quite easily six to ten times more than our regular version. We sell our regular dolls, our lowest ones are $300, and our most expensive collectors’ version is $4,500. Lillian Tetpon: I do [buy commercial furs]. This year the most popular dolls that I have are these mother and babies made out of sealskin. I have a great demand for this doll. Sealskin is very, very expensive, so the prices on my dolls are higher than I would [charge] with any other material that I make.

Several doll makers talked about different aspects of marketing. Ken and Iva Lisbourne talked about their own shyness in marketing: Ken Lisbourne: I think that the hardest part for each Native artist is to be able to talk to the customers and sell your Native crafts. You have to get over that. And I’ve had that problem too. I’m just beginning to be open with my customers, and I love each one of the customers. They’re great. Iva Lisbourne: At ﬁ rst, when we were selling, I never sit [at the sales table] with him, and it’s been only about three years [since] I start sitting.

Doll makers also commented on ways to make more efﬁcient use of materials: Dora Buchea: I make masks. After all the work you do with the skin . . . we scrape it and change water for over a month. All the little scraps I have, I hate to throw them away, so I just start molding them to my doll faces. That way I could tattoo them too, and they look pretty sharp. A lot quicker than carving them.

One perhaps surprising fact is that the purchasers of the more expensive dolls are generally Alaskans. Walton Irrigoo: So far they [the purchasers of very expensive dolls] have all been Alaskans. More than anybody [it] is going to be somebody that lives in the state. We do shows at the museum…. We see a lot of the tourists that come through, and they don’t really look at the dolls. They look more at the carvings, or

Figure 56. The Cama’i Dance Festival held every March in Bethel invites artists to show and sell their arts and crafts. Photo by Amber A. Lincoln, 1999.

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they look at the other artwork that we do. But most of our things will [be sold to] Alaskans. Finally, one doll maker made an explicit connection between teaching younger people and selling: Denise Hardesty: I believe in teaching kids because if they aren’t future artists, they’re future customers. I will never pass up a customer. I’m always out trolling, born that way. So, I’m a salesperson/artist, really.

Doll Making and the Future of Native Arts in General Doll makers have mixed opinions about the future of Native arts and doll making. Some were very positive: Ken Lisbourne: Native arts will never die. Today there are so many younger Native artists who are having craft shows, and they’re very talented. I notice they’ve been passing the arts to their kids and their grandkids. . . . Native artists are getting younger these days, and they’re getting more plentiful. I believe there’s a hundred of us who get together: Eskimos, Indians, Aleuts, Tlingits, Haidas. They’re all out there [and] getting younger, and they’re really working as Native artists. There’s no reason it’s going to die out. It’s just getting stronger. Denise Hardesty: Both my oldest daughters are artists. The oldest one tried plumbing-pipeﬁtting, and she went back to her beads. . . . There’s a hole in the market . . . [because I used to make] beaded sun catchers, and they’re bugging me and wanting something. So I’m going to do the next best thing and say, “Come on, kid, [older daughter] because she’s already done it. She helped—when we did some for the Smithsonian Christmas catalog. We did a limited edition of 250 sun catchers, and there wasn’t very many people around that I could just train just like that to do it. Everybody who said they could, couldn’t, and I ended up having to rely on my kids and my sister-in-law, this woman from Venetie. Eva Hefﬂe: A couple of years ago, I think that man was a principal at Shishmaref, and he’d come to my table twice. He’d come over and he’d say, “Eva, one of my students is learning to sew.” [Then she said] “I’m going to get as good as Eva Hefﬂe or better.” (Laughs.) That made me feel so good. Alice Johnnie: That’s how my grandchildren is learning from me. They watch me. My last grandchildren is four years old, and the other one is one year. They come and watch me. They say, “We’re going to watch you.” I tell them, “Go ahead and watch me.” That’s the way they learn, because that’s the way I

Everything Old Is New Again

learned, by watching. I’ve been sewing since I was seven years old. They like doing this [sewing]. In Juneau, one of my granddaughters lives here now. . . . She was probably about seven years old when she sat at the same table with me in Juneau. She was sewing, and the people liked it. The tourists liked it. They said they’ve never seen the grandmother and a granddaughter sew together, so we had our pictures taken together. They put her sewing things here and mine on this side. So that’s how they learn. Others are less sure about the future of Native doll making, because of the complexity of marketing required for success. Lillian Tetpon: Makes me very unhappy when I see [what happened to] a lot of Eskimo ladies that start making dolls when I was in the village. When I went to my husband’s village, people quit sewing there. I did a lot of sewing, and it brought the interest back into women sewing. So it’s a dying art. The ladies made dolls similar to mine. They made whole bunch of dolls, but they couldn’t sell them. They settled for a very small amount of money, and it was very discouraging because I thought for sure that they were going to make an income like I did. So I tell them that you have to market your things. You have to continually think in large numbers in order to make the money. . . . After they found out that you do have to market your things, then they got discouraged and quit. It made me feel very unhappy, because they didn’t know that you had to do that. It takes years and years to get known for the products that you make. Like Denise Hardesty, each of these doll makers makes the old new. By giving new meanings to old forms, they constantly reinterpret the past with needle and thread, sewing new representations of their history, guided by memory, stories, artifacts, photographs, and imagination. The faces that they put on the past—ivory, cottonwood, or leather—speak volumes about them and that past. It points a way to the future as well.

Note 1

False starts, vocal pauses, and ﬁ llers like “you know” were deleted from the written transcripts to render them easier to read. Deletions of words are marked with ellipses, and inserted words that make the meaning more clear are bracketed. The original tapes and transcripts are archived by the Oral History Program, Alaska and Polar Regions Department, Rasmuson Library, University of Alaska Fairbanks as Not Just a Pretty Face, University of Alaska Museum Special Exhibit Collection, acc. no. H99-38.

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Figure 57.

Figure 58.

Jigging for ﬁ sh doll. 26.5 x 15 x 14, UA2005-003-0005.

Woman Looking Into the Future.

Figure 59. Rosalie Paniyak makes dolls in her living room while her great- granddaughter, Earl Atchak, and Angela Linn look on.

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Rosalie Paniyak A Portrait Angela J. Linn and James H. Barker

Bracing against the biting March wind, we walk up the hill in the village of Chevak while snowmachines buzz past, racing from one end of town to the other. We reach our destination and stomp the snow off our feet. Rosalie greets us with a smile but few words. She seats herself on the ﬂoor and returns to work: she is the creator of hundreds of dolls, each encapsulating, in a few well-chosen features, an aspect of Native life in southwest Alaska.

Standing as if on display, a gut-clad group of quirky ﬁgures performs tasks that you can see any day in the small Cup’ik1 village of Chevak. One wizened man holds a miniature kayak, while another displays a ﬁsh dangling from a jigging stick. A small female doll sits before a cooking pot, legs pulled under her gut parka for warmth. A bucket full of berries is clasped in the arms of yet another tiny woman who leans on a walking stick, satisﬁed with the day’s effort. Rosalie Paniyak is a petite gray-haired woman with a quick smile. She stitches with short, strong, and nimble ﬁ ngers designed more for cutting ﬁ sh than thread, constructing each doll entirely by hand. Beside her on the ﬂoor is a small bag. She extracts a bit of wire that her son scavenged from the village dump, which she uses to make the legs and arms of her dolls. Later, she will cut scraps of sealskin with her uluaq, a semilunar knife used for over a thousand years by Alaska’s Eskimo peoples and sew bright pieces of cotton fabric into a qaspeq, a dress-like garment worn over the parka. As each ﬁ ne stitch is taken and small scraps of fur for a tiny ruff are attached, a small person emerges from Rosalie’s hands. She will bead the eyes of the doll and set the teeth in a gap-tooth grin, bringing to life in skin and cotton a caricature of someone she has observed in town or drawn from memory. Rosalie Paniyak made her ﬁ rst doll in 1953 in order to support her family. She recalls watching older people in the village sewing skins, but Rosalie chose to make

Figure 60. Rosalie Paniyak at home.

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dolls instead. She sold her ﬁ rst efforts to nurses in Anchorage for less than twenty dollars each. She then began to make larger dolls with haunting features, a style for which she was ﬁ rst recognized in the 1970s. Rosalie has since returned to making small dolls, which are easier to sell. She often includes notes with her dolls describing the activity she has depicted. She described her famous “honeybucket doll” as sick with a stomach ache after eating (see Fig. 37). She ﬁ nds humor in the details, a special gift considering the challenges that the Qissunamiut faced for the last three centuries. Following a winter ﬂood in 1946, Rosalie and her family endured a harrowing move from the village of Qissunaq to a new location at Chevak. The old village site of Qissunaq was located a few miles inland from Hazen Bay (Map 1). There, the semisubterranean houses of sod and driftwood were built into a mound that rose ﬁ fteen feet above the barren coastal plain. Qissunaq was a semipermanent winter settlement. During the summer, the Qissunamiut set up temporary camps in their pursuit of various food sources including salmon and small mammals. Throughout the long history of Qissunaq, families would leave the settlement during ﬂood season and disperse to safer hunting grounds. But the villagers always returned when winter set in. In the 1940s, with the encouragement of a priest, the community moved farther inland to a site they now refer to as “Old Chevak.” Following World War II, and with the coming of the Bureau of Indian Affairs schools in the 1950s, the villagers moved again, this time to higher ground at the site of present-day Chevak. The new village, comprised of simple frame houses raised above the ground, required the Cupiit to dramatically alter their lifeways. Many gave up collecting their food from the surrounding wetlands. Rosalie remembers fishing and picking berries and greens. But the store, post ofﬁce, and school of “modern” Chevak and the costly conveniences of electricity and gas have restructured the economy of the delta region and provided the economic incentives for Rosalie to take up doll making. Rosalie grew up on the Yukon–Kuskokwim delta of southwest Alaska and the inspiration for her work surrounds her. Many of her dolls are “activity dolls,” which illustrate the activities of nineteenth and twentieth century Yupiit. (See Fig. 44 for several examples.) Rosalie’s ﬁ gures offer the berries picked from the tundra, or display a bundle of ﬁ rewood collected on a rainy afternoon. Miniature women wave dance fans, mimicking the motions of Cup’ik dancers. Women in colorful qaspeqs hold twined packs full of eggs or display coiled baskets made of beach grass.

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Figures 61–63. From top to bottom: Rosalie Paniyak cuts out eyes for a doll; sewing the nose onto the face; clipping the thread in the doll’s mouth.

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Figure 64 (top left). Sewing the ruff to the hood. Figure 65 (top right). After two days, Rosalie has completed the doll of a woman clubbing a ﬁ sh, a task that was often assigned to her. Photographer James Barker asked if she had ever made a doll showing this action. She responded in the negative, and then created this doll. 30 x 17 x 12, UA2005-003-0001.

What sets Rosalie apart from other Yup’ik, Cup’ik, and Inupiaq doll makers who produce “activity dolls” is her unconventional choice of subjects: an old woman with a missing tooth rides a snowmachine; a youngster sits in the cockpit of a bush plane; a woman paddles her kayak. Rosalie even made a doll that represented an old woman gleefully ﬂourishing a check she just received in the mail, an often-observed event at the local post ofﬁce. Installations of Rosalie’s work at the Alaska Native Medical Center in Anchorage feature seasonal scenes such as Christmas carolers and a nativity with Mary and Joseph dressed in sealskin boots, mittens, and fur-trimmed qaspeqs. In the late 1980s, Rosalie began making Statue of Liberty dolls (see Fig. 38), the classic ﬁgure with a crown made of sealskin and a torch of fur. The economics of doll making favor Rosalie’s work. From her modest beginning, in which she sought only to supplement her family’s income, Rosalie has become so successful that she now supports three generations

Figure 66. Rosalie Paniyak, Rosalie’s great-granddaughter, and Ursula Paniyak at the Alaska Federation of Natives convention, 2004.

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of family members who live with her. Her commercial success has inspired others in Chevak to begin making dolls. Today, perhaps a dozen other women craft dolls in the style Rosalie made famous. Some call them “the uglies” (Schuldberg 1996:11) or “ugly-faced” (Fair 2006:63), describing them as having a “macabre awkwardness” (Ray 1981:129). This awkwardness is visible in the faces, with skin pulled tight, overly large wrinkled noses sewn with heavy stitches, and too-small eyes beaded in black and white. The figures stand with stooped backs, pigeon-toed feet, and bent appendages. But this awkwardness transmits a realism that speaks directly to the viewer’s emotions, eliciting a laugh and a sense of recognition. The perceived “ugliness” or awkwardness has proven no obstacle to the popularity of the Chevak dolls and the success of their makers. One popular art gallery in Fairbanks mounted a display of 149 Chevak dolls by eight doll makers in 2005. The works ranged from small activity dolls to large-scale sculptures. Dolls the size of a kindergartener stood next to a pregnant doll

entitled “I’m Ready.” Nearly every doll had a sealskin face and boots. The gallery owner, Yolande Fejes, noticed that customers were especially conscious of the dolls’ expressions. Doll makers such as Earl Atchak, who is also Cup’ik, comment that Rosalie has broken ground for all of them; her work serves as an inspiration for others. Rosalie Paniyak is the center of a large extended family. Her home is full of activity—young and old constantly come and go; family and friends cycle through the house or lounge on the couch chatting with Rosalie, who sits on the ﬂoor sewing. The radio is tuned to the local station and competes with the voices on the VHF radio, omnipresent in rural Alaskan homes. The phone rings, Rosalie hands it to her son, granddaughter, sister, or whomever else happens to be visiting and goes back to her work, glancing up now and then. Passing along the tradition of doll making in the Paniyak family is a major concern. At craft fairs, Rosalie’s daughter, Ursula, often displays her own dolls alongside those of her mother. Occasions such

Figure 67. Rosalie Paniyak in front of her house in Chevak.

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as the art sale at the annual Alaska Federation of Natives meetings, the Cama-i dance festival in Bethel, the Fur Rendezvous in Anchorage, and the Festival of Native Arts in Fairbanks provide venues for bulk sales. Gift shops across the state carry Rosalie and Ursula’s dolls. Ursula’s daughter, Janice, has been making dolls for the past few years along with Janice’s daughter, Rosalie’s great-granddaughter. Four generations of doll makers in one family testify to the popularity and success of the whimsical characters Rosalie Paniyak envisions, then creates from the raw materials of her daily life in a remote village in the Alaskan bush. Rosalie Paniyak is like many other pioneers—possibly unaware of the signiﬁcant role she has played in the world of Native doll making. Her observations of the world around her, so familiar to her, so foreign to many of her collectors, are communicated honestly, with skin, and cloth and thread. A storyteller at heart, she does what comes naturally to her, depicting her friends and family, pointing out the silly things they do and reproducing them in miniature. And we

Figure 68. A pair of dolls made by Ursula Paniyak, for sale at the Alaska Federation of Natives ar ts and craf ts sale in A nchorage, October 2004.

Figure 69. Float plane doll.

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recognize the stories she tells, seeing ourselves in these little people as we caught our ﬁ rst ﬁsh, or picked our ﬁ rst batch of berries, danced our ﬁ rst dance, or made ourselves sick from eating too much. This recognition of self explains why the ugly-faced dolls have become so well known and widely collected. Their creator, Rosalie Paniyak, is an innovator who began creating out of need and continues out of success, paving the way for the next generation.

Note 1

Cup’ik is a dialect of the Central Alaskan Yup’ik language. The people of Chevak refer to themselves as the Qissunamiut, which translates as “the people [of the village] of Qissunaq.”

Figure 70. Sewing a boy doll into a kayak model.

Figure 71.

Figure 72.

Rosalie’s woman with akutaq doll. Akutaq is also called “Eskimo ice cream” and is made with berries and whipped fat or shortening.

Man with a kayak model and his son. 28 x 14 x 13.5, UA2005003-0006.

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References Akaran, Pauline 1975 The Time Summer Would Not Come: St. Marys Yesterday and Today. St. Marys, Alaska. Ariès, Philippe 1962 Centuries of Childhood: A Social History of Family Life. Translated by Robert Baldwick. New York: Vintage Books. Bandi, Hans Georg 1969 Eskimo Prehistory. Translated by Ann E. Keep. College, AK: University of Alaska Press. Birket-Smith, Kaj 1953 The Chugach Eskimo. Nationalmuseets Skrifter. Ethnograﬁ sk Række 6. Copenhagen. Birket-Smith, Kaj, and Frederica de Laguna 1938 The Eyak Indians of the Copper River Delta, Alaska. Copenhagen: Levin and Munksgaard. Black, Lydia T. 1991 Glory Remembered: Wooden Headgear of Alaska Sea Hunters. Juneau, AK: Friends of the Alaska State Museum. [Includes a reprint of Ivanov, S. V., “Aleut Hunting Headgear and Its Ornamentation,” ﬁ rst published in Proceedings of the 23rd International Congress of Americanists, 1928:477–504.] 2003 Aleut Art, second edition. Anchorage: Aleutian/Pribilof Islands Association. Bockstoce, John R., ed. 1988 The Journal of Rochfort Maguire, 1852–1854. London: Hakluyt Society. Caillois, Roger 1961 Man, Play, and Games. Translated by Meyer Barash. New York: The Free Press of Glencoe. Cameron, Elisabeth L. 1996 Isn’t S/He a Doll? Play and Ritual in African Sculpture. Los Angeles: University of California, Fowler Museum of Cultural History. Cheska, Alyce 1979 “Native American Games as Strategies of Social Maintenance,” in Forms of Play of Native North Americans, eds. Edward Norbeck and Claire R. Farrer, 227–247. 1977 Proceedings of the American Ethnological Society, St. Paul, MN.

Clark, Donald W. 1981 “Prehistory of the Western Subarctic,” in vol. 6 of Handbook of North American Indians: Subarctic, ed. June Helm, 107–129. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press. Cohen, David 1987 The Development of Play. New York: New York University Press. Colecleugh, Emma S. 1876 “The Eskimo.” Providence Journal (May 31):8. Collins, Henry, Frederica de Laguna, Edmund Carpenter and Peter Stone, eds. 1973 The Far North: 2,000 Years of American Eskimo and Indian Art. Washington, DC: National Gallery of Art. Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly, and Stith Bennett 1971 “An Exploratory Model of Play.” American Anthropologist 73(1):45–58. Dall, William H. 1878 “On the Remains of Later Pre-Historic Man Obtained from the Caves in the Catherina Archipelago, Alaska Territory, and Especially from the Caves of the Aleutian Island.” Smithsonian Contributions to Knowledge 22(318). Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution. de Laguna, Frederica 1934 The Archaeology of Cook Inlet, Alaska. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. 1956 Chugach Prehistory: The Archaeology of Prince William Sound, Alaska. Seattle: University of Washington Press. 1960 “The Story of a Tlingit Community: A Problem in the Relationship Between Archaeological, Ethnological, and Historical Methods.” Bureau of American Ethnology Bulletin 172. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution. 1972 Under Mt. St. Elias: The History and Culture of the Yakutat Tlingit. Smithsonian Contributions to Anthropology 7. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press. 1973 “Athabaskan Art,” in The Far North: 2,000 Years of American Eskimo and Indian Art, Henry B. Collins, Frederica de Laguna, Edmund Carpenter and Peter Stone, eds., pp. 133–163. Washington, DC: National Gallery of Art.

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References

Index Note: Italicized page numbers indicate figures or photos.

A

C

Abraham, Margaret (Penni), 26 activity dolls of Helen Carius, 30, 31 and education, 36 of Eva Heffle, 28, 29, 52 of Janice Paniyak, 31 of Rosalie Paniyak, 31, 32, 58, 60–61, 64 of Ursula Paniyak, 31, 63 of various artists, 50 Admiralty Island, 8 Agaveksina, 20 Alaska Native languages and dialects, viii (map), 64n Aleuts, 5–8, 12, 22–23, 50 Alfred, Laura, 50 Alowa, Annie, 48 Alutiiqs, 5–8, 7, 12, 24 amulets, 14, 38, 39 Anaktuvuk Pass doll, 36 anti-aesthetic, of Rosalie Paniyak, 33 antler dolls, 25 archaeological sites, 2 (map) arts and crafts show, 56 Ashcraft, Hilda, 35 Atchak, Earl, 44, 58, 62 Athabascans beaded mittens, 10 Deg Hit’an, 38 dolls, 12, 19, 35, 50 figurines, 8, 18

Canadian Inuit, 13, 37 caribou-jaw doll, Inupiaq, 26 Carius, Helen Slwooko, 30, 31 Carlo, Elena, 42 Carlo, Poldine, 12 Central Yup’ik Eskimos See also Yup’ik entries figurines, 15–18 modern dolls, 30–33 play dolls, 10–11 Charles, Doris, 50 charms, 14, 38nn12–13 Chevak dolls, 32, 59, 62 See also Paniyak, Rosalie children with toys, 36, 42, 43, 44 Christianity, 39n29 Christian missionaries, 24 clans, 51–52, 55 clay heads, 16 Cleveland, Stella, 30 clothing for dolls, 26–27 coiled grass dolls, 26, 30 Cook, James (Captain), 12 Cup’ik dialect, 64n Cup’ik dolls, 26, 31, 44 See also Paniyak, Rosalie Curtis, Mary, 49

B baby belt, Athabascan, 13 Barbie dolls, 35, 42 Beaver, JoAnn, 13 Bering Strait Region, 1–3 Berry, Lucy, 36 bird-people dolls, 33 Bostrom, Agnes, 36 bow and arrow, Canadian Inuit, 13 Brown, Oliver (Nipaloq), 39n33 Buchea, Dora, 48, 52, 54–56 Bunyan-Serovy, Rosalie, 53–54

Index

modern, St. Lawrence Island Yupik, 28–30 doll making economics of, 61–62 materials, 15, 33, 34–35, 59 dolls See also activity dolls; specific ethnic groups; play dolls Anaktuvuk Pass, 36 for arts and crafts sale, 63 in coming-of-age rituals, 11, 13, 45 for divining weather, 38n17 fear of, 44, 53–54 fertility, 8 Greenlandic, 35 life-like qualities of, 52–53 modern, in general, 26 origins of, viii (map) in play and ritual, 43–45 puppets, 21, 39n25, 43 soft-bodied, 10, 26, 30 St. Lawrence Island, 11, 13, 28–30 sun-worm, 38n15 as symbolic babies, 46n7 Tlingit, 14 ugly-faced, 62, 64 of undetermined origin, 37 Western-made, 24, 25, 35, 39n28 Driggs, Elizabeth, 26

D Deg Hit’an Athabascans, 38n17 devil dolls, 18, 19, 33 deities, images of, 5 doll accessories, 10, 26–27 doll ceremony, 38n18 doll festivals, 18, 39nn19–20 doll makers See also individual names on economics of doll making, 54–57 on future of doll making, 57 home villages of, viii (map) on learning to make dolls, 48–51 modern, Central Yup’ik, 30–33 modern, Inupiaq, 25–28

E economics of doll making, 61–62 Eek village style, 30 Eningowuk, Delbert, 26 Eskimo belief system, 22

F Fair, Susan W., 39n32 fall whaling rituals, 20 fear of dolls and f ig urines, 44, 53–54 Fermoyle, Betty, 32 fertility dolls, 8 figures and figurines See also under ethnic groups

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fear of, 44, 53–54 headless, 6, 15 house guardians, 15 life-sized, 7, 20 Nukleet, 4 Okvik, 1–3 Old Bering Sea, 3 origins of, viii (map) in rituals and ceremonies, 15–19, 23–24 St. Lawrence Island, 3, 26 uses, in general, 8–10 figurine floats, 19–20 flying puguqs, 20 Francis, Rosa, 27 Friday, Monica, 32 functionalists, on play, 41, 45

ivory-headed dolls, 9, 28 miniature, 6, 23 prehistoric, 6

J Johnnie, Alice, 49, 51–52, 54, 55, 57 Jowly Man, 5

O K

games, 46n1 gender roles, traditional, 38n11, 43, 45 grave goods, 8 Greenlandic dolls, 35

Kamerling, Leonard, 52, 54 Kanrilak, Rose, 32 kayak models, 7, 8 Kilbuck, John, 39n19 Kilowiyi, Miriam, 13, 30 Kingeekuk, Floyd and Amelia, 26, 28–29 King Island, 19 Kodiak Island, 7–8 Kokrine, Marvin, 53 Koontz, Velma, 11 Kotzebue tradition, 26, 27, 29 Koweluk, Ruth, 53, 54 Miss Koyukuk doll, 35 Kululhon, Ellie, 30

H

L

Hardesty, Denise, 47, 50, 53, 55, 57 harpoon head, Aleut, 5 hats, Aleut, 23 headless figures, 6, 15 head piece, wooden, 9 heads, clay and ivory, 16 heads, wooden, 29 Hef f le, Eva, 27–28, 29, 39n34, 49–51, 52, 53, 57 Hensel, Chase, 54 historic period, 10–13, 38 Hooper Bay figures, 17 horn dolls, 25, 26, 39n32 house guardians, 15 Houser, Allan, 50 Huizinga, Johan, 41

languages and dialects, viii (map), 64n Larson, Linda, 50–51 Lawrence, Annie, 50 life-sized figures, 7, 20 Lincoln, Emma Black, 27 Linn, Angela, 58 Lisbourne, Iva, 48, 49, 53–56 Lisbourne, Ken, 48, 50–53, 55–57 Lyons, Jeff, 26

G

I illnesses, dolls and, 46n4 indigenous religions, 39n29 infant with Catholic medal, 24 interviews. See doll makers Inupiaq dolls, 11–12, 25–28, 33, 35 Inupiaq figurines, 9, 10, 18–22 Inupiaq housewife, 10 Irrigoo, Walton, 48, 49, 55–56, 56–57 ivory carvings busts, 8 figurines, 3, 19 function unknown, 5 heads, 16

70

Newell, William Wells, 42 Northwest Coast dolls and figurines, 8, 12–14, 23–24 Norton, Minnie, 27 Nukleet figures, 4 Nunivak Island figure, 17

M Madonna, Okvik, 3 marionettes, 21, 39n25, 43 Marston, Marvin R. “Muktuk,” 27, 28 Martins, Anna, 32 masks, 36, 39n35 Mead, Margaret, 42 memorials to the dead, 17–18 Mendenhall-Mills, Ida, 28 men’s house, 18, 20 mittens, Athabascan, 10 moieties, 23, 51–52, 55 Morrow, Phyllis, 46n7 mother and baby, 12 mother-and-child figurines, 15–17

Okvik figurines, 1–3 Old Bering Sea figurines, 3 old people dolls, 30, 33 Old Togiak partial figures, 17 Omwari, Pansy, 30 Oscar, Martina, 36

P Paneak, Simon, 36 Paneak, Susie, 36 Paniyak, Janice, 31, 33, 63 Paniyak, Rosalie dolls of, 31, 32, 61, 63 family of, 61–62 at home, 58, 59, 62 making dolls, 60, 61, 64 and old-people style, 33 Rosalie Bunyan-Serovy on, 53–54 Paniyak, Ursula, 31, 33, 61, 62, 63 parkas, miniature, 10 Paul, William, 50 Penayah, Caroline Kava, 48, 53 phenomenologists, on play, 41 Piaget, Jean, 42–44 Pike, Mabel, 50 Plato, 45 play defi nitions of, 41–42 historical study of, 42–43 as practice, 43–44 Helen Schwartzman on, 46n1 theories on ritual and, 45 play dolls, 10–13, 43, 46n2 See also under ethnic groups Pletnikoff, Sophie, 50 Point Hope dolls and figurines, 20, 21, 43 portrait-style dolls, 26 prehistoric period, 5–8 productivity and play, 46n1 puguqs, 20, 39n24 puppets, 21, 39n25, 43 “putting away the dolls,” 11, 13

Q N Nayamin, Natalia, 32 negative energy, 51 Nemayaq, 10, 16, 17, 38n14 neuropsychologists, on play, 41–42

Qissunamiut, 64n Qissunaq, 60 quartz crystal, 19, 20, 39n22 quluguluguqs, 39n24

Index

R rabbit skins, 47 rag dolls, 9 Ramos, Elaine, 23 rituals coming-of-age, 11, 13, 45 doll ceremony, 38n18 dolls in play and, 43–45 huma n f ig u r ines in, 15–19, 23–24 seasonal, 7, 20, 45 whaling, 20 rock-faced doll, 9

dolls, 11, 13, 28–30 figurines, 3, 15–18, 26 heads, 16 house guardians, 15 Statue of Liberty dolls, 32, 61 Stone, Clothilda, 26, 33 Stone, Henry, 33 stone-headed dolls, 13–14 storyknifi ng, Yup’ik girls and, 36 story knives, 38n10 sun-worm doll, 38n15 superstitions, 11, 12 Svarney, Gertrude, 22

S

T

Savaroff, Hartina, 50 Schoppert, Jackie, 49, 51 Schwartzman, Helen, 46n1 seasonal rituals and traditions, 7, 20, 45 Seward Peninsula, 28 sewing kit, Inupiaq, 10 shaman figures, 20, 23 shamans, 18, 23–24, 44 shamans’ dolls and figurines, 6, 8, 16, 39n28 sitting ceremony, 20 skin boat with whaling crew, 20 skin mask, 36 Sledge Island, 19 Sledge Island float, 19 Smith, Helen, 33 Smith, Natalia, 33 Smith, Viva Wesley, 26, 30 soft-bodied dolls, 10, 26, 30 Sours, Burton, 53 Sours, Lena, 27, 39n33, 49 souvenirs, 7, 8, 24–25 Sparks, Lucy, 38 Spencer, Dolly Mendenhall, 27, 28 spirit access point, 6 spirit guard (yake), 23 spirit quests, 23–24 St. Lawrence Island doll boots, 10

taboos, 11, 12, 20 tails, symbolism of, 53 Tetpon, Lillian, 51, 54–57 Thule period, 3–4, 6 Tlingit dolls and figurines, 14, 23, 50, 55 Toll, Louise, 33 Tooyak, Andrew, Sr., 50 topknots, 35 toys, Athabascan, 13 Tubis, Henry, 50

Index

U ugly-faced dolls, 62, 64 umiak model, 21 Umnak Island, 5 Unalaska Island, 7 Unga Island, 7 Ungott, Josephine, 30 unisuit, 12

V visor, Aleut, 22

W walrus ivor y car vings. See ivor y carvings Walrus Man, 7, 22 Washington, Ethel, 26–27

weather-divining dolls, 38n17 Westerners, and Alaska Natives, 38 Western-made dolls, 24, 25, 35, 39n28 whale bone dolls, 26 whaling kit, 19 whaling rituals, 20 White, Grace, 30 winter festivities, Aleut, 7 wooden carvings dolls, 9 head piece, 9 heads, 29 masks, 39n35 memorials to the dead, 17–18 by Nemayaq, 16 shaman figure, 23 shamans’ dolls, 24 Sledge Island float, 19 wooden-faced dolls, 33, 39n35 wooden-headed dolls, 9, 26, 39n33 work vs. play distinction, 41

Y yoke dolls, 11, 43 Yukon Island, 8 Yukon–Kuskok wim Delta dolls, 38n10 Yupik dolls, 11, 13, 28–30, 30 See also St. Lawrence Island Yup’ik dolls See also Cup’ik dolls; Paniyak, Rosalie activity dolls, 33, 34, 36 conventions for playing with, 45 man in fur parka, 26 modern, 30–33 play dolls, 9, 10–11 Yup’ik figures and figurines, 10, 15–18, 17 Yup’ik girls and storyknifi ng, 36 Yup’ik miniatures, 10, 13

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