Friday, May 13th, 2005. Yup'ik masks.
The name Yup’ik is the self designation of the Eskimos of Western Alaska and is derived from their word for “person” (yuk) plus the postbase -pik meaning “real” or “genuine.” Like many indigenous people throughout the world, they consider themselves “real people” in contrast to presumably less-real outsiders. They are members of the larger family of Inuit cultures extending from Prince William Sound on the Pacific coast of Alaska to Bering Strait, and from there six-thousand miles north and east along Canada’s Arctic coast into Labrador and Greenland. Within that extended family, they are members of the Yup’ik-speaking, not Inuit/Iñupiaq-speaking, branch.
Masks, in essence, were stage props, special but not sacred, and most were destroyed after use. Sometimes a group of masked dancers took the floor, but at other times a single performer focused attention. The masks’ appearance shifted as the dancers moved in the dimly lit space. Masked performers transcended themselves in the audiences eyes, but the mask also transformed the performer’s experience. Dancing behind the wooden barrier of the mask simultaneously restricted physical sight and enhanced spiritual vision. Some masks were believed to actually imbue the dancers with the spirits represented. The unsteady, changeable character of these past performances is hard to imagine in the quiet, carefully lit atmosphere of museum exhibit cases.
A first encounter with Yup’ik masks may leave the viewer overwhelmed by their varied abundance and imaginative force. They differ in size as much as in shape, ranging from tiny forehead “maskettes” measuring three or four inches in diameter to monstrous twenty-pound constructions that no dancer could wear without external support. The Yupiit, who are known for their tolerance of multiple perspectives on the way the world works, were open to individual variation among maskmakers and the angalkut (shamans) who directed them.
Masks presented a wide range of beings and experiences through performances and stories. One told of an angalkuq’s journey under the sea or into the skyland, and included appended parts representing the creatures he encountered. Others represented animal yuit (persons). Carvers made masks depicting insects, berries, wood, ice, and myriad creatures of everyday life.
The formal continuity of Yup’ik masks is also impressive. Carvers creatively appropriated and transformed a common set of design elements, including toothy mouths, thumbless hands, “goggled” eyes, and feather halos. Expert Yup’ik carvers, of whom there were hundreds during the last half of the 19th century, each had a recognizable vision and style.
Carvers strove to represent the helping spirits or animal yuit they, or the angalkut who directed them, encountered in vision, dream, or experience. Although some, such as angalkut, were recognized as having more direct contact with the spirit world than others, through masks and masked dancers everyone could vividly experience it.
The National Museum of Natural History at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington D.C is the repository for a large collection of Yup’ik masks and ceremonial objects. 27 of these are can be viewed in this Web based exhibit. Many were a part of the Agayuliyararput exhibit and are available for study by native and non-native researchers alike.
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[Ignacio Wenley Palacios]
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