Messages Across Time and Space: Inupiat Drawings from the 1890s at Columbia University

a digital companion to an exhibition at the Center for the Study of Ethnicity and Race, September-November 2015

Curatorial Statement

 Reindeer_and_Eskimos_of_Cape_Prince_of_Wales_Alaska           bern2

left:  O.D. Goetze, Reindeer and Eskimos of Cape Prince of Wales, Alaska, n.d. Alaska Museum of History and Art, AMRC-b01-41-256; right:  Susan Bernardi teaching geography, ca. 1906. Special Collections, UW Libraries, UW23520z

Elizabeth Hutchinson

The drawings in this exhibition were made by indigenous artists during a time of extreme hardship caused by the United States colonization of Alaska Native territory. The Inupiat people were the subject of visual and verbal representations, such as the ones at the head of this page, that characterized them as exotic primitives.  In the picture at left, the herders stand stiffly before the camera posed, like their charges, so as to display their unfamiliar appearance to a faraway viewer; in the image at right, young students submit to the discipline of a western education symbolized by books, a globe and a scolding teacher.

As historian of Native art Janet Berlo has explained: “Considered in social terms, representation stands for the interests of power. Consciously or unconsciously, all institutionalized forms of representation certify corresponding institutions of power.” (Berlo 1990: 138)  The drawings here, produced within the linked institutions of U.S. education and Christian missionization and most likely produced for Anglo-Americans with an interest in those institutions, can also be understood as certifying that larger colonial context.  Yet disempowered indigenous people also left behind visual records of their experiences of such times of historical upheaval.  One drawing made by a member of the Inupiat community at Wales for missionary Harrison R. Thornton integrates a representation of trading with sailors on the U.S. Revenue Cutter Bear with scenes of a “traditional” whale hunt that belies no sense of cultural inferiority.

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Unknown Inupiaq artist from Wales, Revenue Cutter ‘Bear,’ early 1890s from the Peary-MacMillan Arctic Museum, Bowdoin College

As Berlo instructs, careful attention to the works of art made during these times can yield vital information of how the artists made sense of and responded to cultural change.  In the twentieth century, scholars of indigenous art tended to focus on works perceived as “traditional” and unsullied by the influences of cross-cultural contact.  In recent decades, scholars have turned to less “pure” objects for the information they yield not only about historical experience but also about communal and individual artistic expression.

C00_1483_306r_1500180008r          C00_1483_301r_1500180003r

 

Left:  Drawing Unknown Inupiat artist, Drawing H, Line of Men in Different Clothing, and Right:  Unknown Inupiat artist, Drawing C, King Island Wolf Dancers with audience and musicians, Both are pencil and ink on paper, Columbia University Art Properties in Avery Art and Architecture Library (C00.1483.306 and 301)

The curators of this exhibition believe that the drawings in the Columbia collection are rich with meaning about Inupiat life and culture. The care with which this group of artists undertook the task of documenting the Messenger Feast, an essential event in Inupiat ceremonial life, resulted in clear records of significant components of that ritual, the details of the material objects involved, and the identities of the participants.  Moreover, the drawings use composition, style, and technique to endow these details with affective significance, calling an informed viewer’s attention to the actions, ideas and values that underlie the Messenger Feast.  As a result, we believe that the making of the drawings demonstrates an understanding of the linked practices of observation and communication that are essential to the expression of Inupiat cultural literacy.

 

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