recently women often have made the baskets either alone or with partial assistance. Eunice Hank, for instance, first wove for her husband Carl. After his death, other male family members did the rough preparation of the weaving materials, but she finished them, wove the baskets, and even carved their finials. Alec and Elaine Frankson of Point Hope split up the chores much as had the Hanks. In this present generation Mary Jane Tevuk Litchard and Marilyn Hank both prepare and weave the baskets themselves.
Finally, one only need look at the photograph of Kinguktuk (QiNaqtaq), taken in the 1920s (fig. 8), his wife Qusraaq sitting at his side holding a half-finished basket, to realize that when they could, basketmakers returned to the long-established male-female division of labor. I don’t want to overstate the case—many basketmakers’ wives have had their own interests or been too busy—I simply want to acknowledge, however belatedly, those women who have participated in basketmaking through the years.
A final factor that may have contributed to the continuance of baleen basketry is the growing prestige attached to native arts by Alaska native people themselves. Shortly after this research was finished I heard my first report of a baleen basket made for an Inupiaq recipient. When Alec Frankson learned that Eban Hopson2 of Barrow was very ill, he made him a baleen basket with a whale’s tail, a polar bear, and a seal3 on the finial (Frankson 1984; see note26. page 67, this volume). Today, Alaska native arts have taken center stage as symbols of ethnic identity,4 and a growing number of Alaska natives collect Alaska 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
