Baleen Basketry of the North Alaskan Eskimo. Molly Lee
native art, including baleen baskets.
Predictably, changes have occurred in the types of weaving, finial depictions, and size of baskets over the last twenty years. One example of change is the adoption of Barrow spaced-stitch weaving in Point Hope. When I returned to Point Hope in 1984, I went to visit Andrew Tooyak, Sr., and found him sitting on the floor with the baleen basket monograph in his lap, teaching himself this new, more efficient form of weaving, which he proudly referred to by name. Since then, others have taken it up and from what I have seen, it has virtually replaced the old, wide-weaver, Point Hope-style technique. This in turn has affected the shapes of Point Hope baskets, which have traded their straight-sided angularity for a more curvilinear profile. In addition, today’s baskets are markedly smaller than their predecessors, probably also a time-saving device.
Changes in finial motifs have also occurred. Whereas Point Hope artists once followed George Omnik’s lead in making narrative finial scenes—polar bears capturing seals, for instance—in 1997, the single-motif finial seems to be the rule. Among the loveliest is the sleeping swan motif first developed, I believe, by Patrick Attungana.
Beyond these new expressions, some aspects of baleen basketry have begun to be incorporated into other art forms. In 1990, I purchased an ivory and baleen ponytail-holder made by Titus Nashookpuk of Point Hope. A curved piece of ivory, inset with baleen plugs to resemble polka dots, is pierced around the perimeter like a finial. It is encircled by several rows of Point Hope-style baleen weaving. The relationship between the ivory and the baleen builds on the idea of the subservience of the basket to the finials discussed in this study (see page 18). A second example are some recent whale bone masks made by John Kayoulik of Point Hope. Kayoulik has pierced a flat piece of relief-carved bone around the perimeter like a finial. Several rows of baleen coiling encircle the carving as a fur ruff on a parka encircles a face.
To summarize, the forms, techniques, and styles of baleen baskets have changed over the past two decades, as have the locations where basketmaking is practiced. But many diverse factors—new standards in quality (probably enforced by respect of younger artists for the senior generation of basketmakers in Point Hope today), a rising pride among Inupiaq people in ethnically identifiable objects, and recent innovations and adaptations, to name a few—bode well for the future of the art form.
On a broader level, there is one additional factor that can make a difference in the perpetuation of baleen basketry and, indeed, native art in general. To be viable now and in the future, the subsistence way of life that has sustained Alaska native cultures for a thousand years requires a cash boost for the many imported items that connect isolated rural communities with the outside world.5 Oil booms may come and go, but the only identifiably native way to earn cash is through the creation and sale of expressive culture, whether it is dancing, singing, storytelling, or the plastic arts. Thus, it is in the more centrally located communities such as Anchorage, Barrow, Bethel, and Fairbanks, now the largest population centers of Alaska native peoples, where native culture is most severely threatened. I hope that future generations of Alaska native artists, consumers, and researchers will focus their energies in these places in particular to help bring this about.
Baleen Basketry
OF THE NORTH ALASKAN ESKIMO
By his craftsmanship the artist constructs a material object that is also an object of knowledge.
—Claude Lévi-Strauss
Introduction
For more than half a century, Eskimos1 of North Alaska2 have made baskets of baleen, the keratinous substance from the mouths of plankton-eating whales. Never as widespread as ivory carving, baleen basketmaking has nonetheless contributed significantly to the livelihood of its practitioners in the arctic villages of Barrow, Point Hope, Wainwright, and Point Lay, Alaska. But today, like the arts of so many small-scale societies, baleen basketry faces extinction. The main intent of this investigation, therefore, was to make a permanent record of the art form while its few remaining practitioners were still alive. But the study had a second aim as well. Almost fifty years have passed since the first baleen basket was collected by a museum, yet in the interim there has been no thorough description and analysis of them. The explanation for this neglect is simple. Baleen baskets are a so-called tourist art,3 made by Eskimos for nonnative consumption (Graburn 1976a); because of their hybrid and commercial associations, investigators have habitually spumed4 such arts. Their collective disdain is distilled in one museum curator’s response to a baleen basket collection offered him for purchase. He wrote: “The … Barrow baskets submitted for consideration are modern and acculturated … Ethnology … has no use for such objects” (Krieger 1938). Nevertheless, art does not cease to be art because it is no longer traditional, any more than people stop being people because they are in the process of acculturation (Graburn 1967). The second goal of this study, therefore, was to contribute to the growing fund of knowledge about tourist art and to its legitimization.
Since baleen basketry had no corpus of existing literature, the information presented here is a mosaic pieced together from sources as scattered as they are fragmentary. Over the past two years I have made several research trips: two each to the Alaskan Arctic and the eastern seaboard, and four others around the rest of Alaska and the western United States. During these trips I have examined and photographed more than two hundred baskets in museums, private collections, and shops, and have interviewed basketmakers, scholars, collectors, ethnic art dealers, and others knowledgeable about the baskets. Throughout this same period, I have corresponded with those I was unable to see in person. My reconstruction of the history of baleen basketmaking draws heavily on these interviews.
Some facets of this study remain to be amplified by future research. Because I am discussing most aspects of baleen basketry for the first time here, a few important points are still obscure, others only partially illuminated. Some of these shortcomings are the result of insufficient evidence, others, perhaps, of inaccurate conclusions drawn in reconstituting history from so many disparate fragments. Future work will, I hope, close these gaps and correct any fallacies in the present investigation.
Fairbanks, 1983
The Cultural Context of Baleen Basketry
The homeland of the Eskimos stretches eastward from the North Cape of Siberia through Alaska and Canada to Greenland, and southward along the Alaskan coast to Prince William Sound (fig. 1). The Eskimos are classified as a subgroup of the Mongoloid race and their languages form a discrete phylum, subdivided into two major stocks: Yup’ik, spoken by the Siberian, Bering Sea, and Pacific populations; and Inupiaq, the language used from Norton Sound eastward to Greenland. Despite its wide geographical occurrence, traditional Eskimo culture enjoyed a remarkable degree of racial, cultural, and linguistic homogeneity (Oswalt 1967).
The coastline of arctic Alaska was settled by 3000–4000 B.C., but to survey those aspects of North Alaskan Eskimo culture shaping the context of baleen basketry, it is necessary to reach only as far back as the Western Thule period immediately preceding European contact.
WESTERN THULE PERIOD, CA. 1100–1826
Because of the annual migrations of sea mammals to the arctic coast, large permanent settlements grew up there, and several of them have been inhabited continuously for the past 2,000 years. The oldest and largest is Point Hope, with a population possibly as great as 1,000 prior to the arrival of the Europeans (Rainey 1947). About A.D. 800, whale hunting had become the keystone for the common cultural and subsistence patterns of the arctic communities, and these same patterns have persisted in modified form to the present day (Larsen and Rainey 1948; Bockstoce 1976).
Until well after European contact, the basic socioeconomic unit in North Alaska was the extended family, a cooperative kinship group of fluctuating number (Spencer 1959; Burch 1975). The seasonal round of subsistence activities exploited both maritime and inland resources; these included winter ice hunting, spring whaling, summer walrus hunting, and fall migrations inland. There, family groups from the coast hunted caribou and traded with the