Eskimo Drawings/Upside Down: Seasons among the Nunamiut

Eskimo Drawings. Edited by Suzi Jones. (Anchorage: Anchorage Museum of History and Art, 2004. Pp. 208, foreword, acknowledgments, introduction, photographs, illustrations, map, notes, bibliography, index. $24.95 paper) ; Upside Down: Seasons among the Nunamiut. By Margaret B. Blackman. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2004. Pp. xii + 206, acknowledgments, introduction, photographs, illustration, maps, notes. $27.95 cloth) Together, these books provide insights into the personal and cultural lives of some of the peoples of Alaska, but they certainly go about it in different ways. Obviously, Eskimo Drawings focuses on the visual products that certain Native artists have produced, and perhaps less obviously, Upside Down focuses as much on the anthropologist who finds herself doing work among the Nunamiut (inland Eskimo) as it does on the Nunamiut themselves. From these quite different approaches, however, the reader gains insights into the interior life of these particular Eskimos. Eskimo Drawings accompanies an exhibit by the Anchorage Museum of History and Art, which concluded in September 2003. The first exhibit to focus on the museum's extensive collection of Eskimo art, it focused on the lives and cultures of specific artists from the Seward Peninsula area (Inupiat) the Yukon delta area (Yupiit) and the Bering Sea islands (Siberian Yupiit). The drawings represent a historic range from the late 1800s to the late 1900s, with only one woman featured among the men in this male-dominant profession. Some of the artists came to this work because of injuries that prevented them from carrying out their expected roles as hunters; some others, the earlier ones, were encouraged by missionaries and other whites to produce this art; while Napaaq, the lone woman artist, seems to have begun as a way of helping an archaeologist-bureaucrat (Otto Geist) gather information about Yup'ik culture and society, as much for the personal relationship she had with him as for the payment. The articles in the catalog are interesting because of their variety, which Suzi Jones, the editor, created by mixing up scholarly works with personal reminiscences by the artists' relatives or friends, including one piece by a white artist-gallery owner. The scholarly pieces are an interesting mix of an art-historical focus on formal analysis with a heightened sensibility toward personal, cultural, and social influences and effects of the art; and the personal pieces flesh out the influence of the artists on their families and communities. The drawings are fascinating not only for their styles and historic development, but for their common interest in detailed, esoterically ethnographic representation of Eskimo folklife, appearance, domestic life, occupational customs, and landscape. The artists broadly were in concert in their desire to maintain their traditions through graphic representation, even though-and this is a fascinating point-they drew for the tourist trade and other outsiders. Connected to this point is that typically the artists included written narratives, either inscribed on the graphic piece itself or attached to it, that explained the scene in terms of customary life. A central, or at the least, a contributing motive for the drawing for all of these artists was to pass on cultural information. Milo Minock would not only draw scenes, but would draw details of material items (e.g., bone lamps, stone lamp, clay lamp, sealskin bag for oil) underneath or on the side of the picture to show the details, almost like pages from a Yup'ik version of Popular Mechanics , as contributor Steve Henrikson notes (176). This need to narratize customary life in a personal way to an outside audience-whether that audience is the Native group which is today culturally distant from the originating artist's culture, or whether it is a non-Native audience that never had a connection to the Native tradition-is perhaps what most connects Eskimo Drawings to Upside Down. …

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