I recently visited Columbia University in the city of New York to see a set of ten pencil-and-ink drawings. The drawings are almost 4,000 miles from their presumed home in Wales, Alaska, where it is believed Iñupiaq artists produced them at the close of the nineteenth century. Rendered on the verso of woodcut-image book pages supplied by Euro-American missionaries, they depict elements of an annual summer festival. At the time, publishers could print only on one side of the paper, leaving the flip side a smooth, blank surface primed for drawing.
The drawings are all roughly six by nine and a half inches, done in pencil and red and black ink. They range from carefully mapped scenes of dancers to almost diagrammatic renderings containing portraits and elements of regalia worn for the Messenger Feast. The Messenger Feast is a multi-day, elaborately planned production traditionally held by Iñupiaq and Yup’ik communities. Men wear mantles of wolverine, and dancing and drumming goes late into the Arctic night. Those in Wales and surrounding villages take part in the celebrations and the feast.
Spare colour and deliberate lines, long hallmarks of Iñupiaq art, describe figures at rest, play, and ceremony. In one drawing, men wearing mantles of wolverine dance across the page, cheered on by abstracted, receding figures at the margins. In another, two men, their features and parkas distinct, sit cross-legged and companionably smoke a pipe. At their feet, smoking paraphernalia is carefully, almost instructively drawn.
Unidentified Artist Two Men in Different Clothing with Carved Tobacco Pipes (recto) (c. 1890) Ink and pencil on paper [16 x 24cm]
The Bush Collection of Religion and Culture
Turning any of the pages over reveals an illustration from popular Victorian-era books: Dotty Dimple at Play (1868), Willis and the Pilot (1864), and Five Great Artists: Callot, Van-Dyck, Murillo, Poussin, Rubens (c.1890). English woodcut prints and Inupiaq drawings, locked in conversation forever, help us understand the major upheavals faced by Indigenous people at the fin de siècle.
The medium is often the message with Iñupiaq art; long before missionaries landed in Northwest Alaska, Iñupiaq craftsman made use of materials found in both their direct environment and acquired through rich and ranging trade networks. Sealskins, harvested from the coast, fringed expressive masks of whalebone. Bluebird Italian glass beads, imported over the Silk Road, paired naturally with mammoth and walrus ivory in earrings and labrets. Caribou hides, traded with more inland settlements, were pieced together in elegant parkas. A major crossroads of trade, the arts and crafts of Wales reveal a scope of commerce that reached far beyond the settlement.
Aside from decades of seasonal trade with whalers (and one searing episode of violence in 1877, Google ‘Gilley Affair’), the people of Wales suffered no permanent white intrusion until the summer of 1890. On July 4 of that year, the noted Alaskan missionary Sheldon Jackson planted two Congregationalist teachers/missionaries in a newly built schoolhouse in the middle of the village. From there, they commenced their task of bringing the English language and American education and culture to the Kinigmiut. In turn, the men learned the Iñupiaq language and a host of Arctic hunting and survival skills.
Despite the great waves of change in Wales and other Iñupiaq villages, longstanding rituals remained vital. The annual Messenger Feast was among the most important events, connecting Iñupiaq communities near and far. It is this festival that is depicted in the ten drawings at Columbia.
The drawings arrived at Columbia from the collection of Wendell Ter Bush (1867–1941), a longtime philosophy professor at the university. Bush collected widely, with an eye to religious and spiritual objects; the American Southwest, Canada, Japan, Africa, and Alaska, are among the places represented in the collection. Like many objects in ‘world arts’ collections at the time, the drawings have limited provenance, although they are believed to have been produced at the mission school in Wales.
One missionary, Harrison Thornton, of Farmville, Virginia, had answered an ad for “volunteer teachers to go to the barbarous Eskimo Arctic Alaska.” A law school dropout with depressive tendencies, Thornton had previously worked as a miner, a clerk, a newspaper reporter, and a teacher.
Making use of his checkered resume in Wales, he started The Eskimo Bulletin, billed as the world’s only yearly newspaper. Excerpts from the inaugural 1893 issue give us a sense of life in Wales at the time. The Fashion column announces, “Tooh-twoi-na has a new pair of safety-pin ear rings,” and “Ke-rook sports two of Dr. Drigg's glass bottle-stoppers for labreta.” A missive from nearby Port Clarence noted “reindeer thriving.” The average daily attendance at the mission school is recorded as 160, children and adults alike.
Unidentified Artist Inventory of the Regalia used in the Eagle-Wolf Dance (recto) (c. 1890) Ink and pencil on paper [15 x 24cm]
The Bush Collection of Religion and Culture
The two drawings that stand out are Drawing 1 and Drawing 7. Drawing 1 is conceived as a diagram, subdivided into three rows and five columns, in each nested a smaller drawing.
The first row shows heads of wolves resting on little red puffs, the second neatly encircled tassels, the third dotted red mitts. A ‘header column’ is leftmost, portraits of men in profile and three-quarter profile.
The first man has an aquiline nose, eyes placed high and close to the hair. Red ink marks his lips, the rim of his eyes, dotted colour his cheeks. His chin is long.
The next man turns slightly closer to the viewer, his right eyelash and brow peeking over the beginning of his nose. The three-quarter profile is difficult to execute, necessitating an understanding of perspective, space, and form. Like the first man, his mouth is slightly agape, with square teeth methodically gridded and framed in bright red ink. Light strokes mark the chin, and a small ear is placed low on the head.
The final man is the triumph of the three, turning still more toward us, grinning. A small mustache frames his mouth and long chin, and the brows are described in short, concentrated strokes. Evenly spaced red strokes colour the cheeks, their gridded nature echoed in the superstructure of the drawing.
The consistency demonstrated in the left portion of the drawing convinces me that the leftmost column are portraits of individual men in the community. The left part of the drawing is consistent; the individual elements repeat with little variation, whereas the men drawn are shown with varying perspectives, ears bigger and smaller, and differently worn facial hair.
Drawing 7 takes on a similarly instructive tone. Four men stand facing towards the viewer, their arms held slightly apart from their bodies and their feet slightly wide. In the windows created between the men’s heads, four men sit cross-legged on a platform. Looking at these drawings, I am reminded of Egyptian art, with figures taking stances conducive to a clear description of all body parts.
The drawings demonstrate the flexibility of the unnamed Iñupiaq draftsmen to assimilate elements of Western pictorial style, as well as Western materials and implements, into the broader tradition of Iñupiaq graphic art. As in Ke-rook’s bottle-stopper labreta, the Iñupiaq alchemized Western imports to satisfy their own cultural and aesthetic sensibilities.
Amy Igri Lowndes is Iñupiaq. She lives in Brooklyn, New York, and works as a Conservation Fellow at the American Museum of Natural History. In her free time she likes to sew, monitor life drawing classes and translate poetry.