Iñupiat Bow Drill
The British Museum | walrus ivory, hide | made before 1855 and collected by Lt. William Hooper
Image Credit: The British Museum
Etching, Intention, and the Iñupiat
Styles of Ivory Engraving as Clues to the Reasons for their Creation and Collection
Created before 1855, just over a foot long, and threaded with a worn leather strap knotted at both ends, this bow drill shows signs of use at its extremities. Strung across a rounded tool like a violin bow, this object enables the quick kindling of a fire or the speedy boring of a hole in an otherwise impenetrable piece of ivory or wood (Hutchinson 2015a). George Emmons, an American naval officer who studied Alaskan Native culture extensively while collecting artifacts for the American Natural History Museum, noted in his observations of Tlingit customs that wooden bow drills would have been difficult to keep dry and that, therefore, an ivory bow drill was an extremely sought-after, if ordinary, object; it should be noted that, while this bow drill comes from an Iñupiat community, it would likely be similarly valued for its durable usefulness (Low et al. 1991; National Museum of the American Indian 2022). Embedded in its surface between two deep grooves are sharply incised images: a flock of seagulls, a person in a kayak, a whale spouting air from its blowhole.
Dorothy Ray Jean, in her seminal work Graphic Arts of the Alaskan Eskimo, notes that Alaskan Native people have long decoratively carved useful ivory objects, despite some claims that the skill was learned from European or American whalers and their scrimshaw pastime (Ray 1969, 9). She divides ivory etchings by Alaskan Native artists – typically within the Iñupiaq, Iñupiat, Yup’ik, Tlingit, and Haida communities – according to style. In the pre-contact “old engraving style,” knives, sewing kits, and bow drills like this one featured “stick men and schematic figures" (typically caribou and men in sea canoes), etched and inked in deep black on an unpainted background (Ray 14). Ray stresses that these figures are not more simplistic than western scrimshaw but rather adhere to a different vision of artistic pictorialization.
Between 1870 and 1900, as white settlers began to arrive in the Department of Alaska en masse, the “modified engraving style” began to be employed in the creation of souvenir walrus tusks; adopting western engraving tendencies that employed more use of shading and exact detail, these tusks also depicted different things than traditional carvings did, emphasizing for a white settler audience the purportedly exotic animal life, rugged landscape, and intriguing Alaskan Native cultural objects that would mark these items as authentically indigenous (Ray 16). Angokwazhuk and Guy Kakaroo are the Iñupiat artists credited with first incorporating western pictoralization into their ivory carving, a practice which quickly swept through other Alaskan Native communities from which souvenir items were in great demand in the 1890s at the height of the Gold Rush (Hutchinson 2015b).
That the western style used for engraving ivory was adopted by talented Inupiat artisans solely in order to create made-for-sale ivory cribbage boards suggests that these artists had economic intentions. That ivory carving shifted from a custom used to adorn useful and valued objects to a practice used to creatively allure souvenir-seeking settlers may suggest that the sale of souvenirs had quickly become just as useful and important to Alaskan Native people as expedient fire starting and drilling had been many years prior, when this bow-drill was acquired by a British naval officer named Lt. Hooper (who was sent to Sitka to search for men who died while seeking the Northwest Passage) (Worrall 2017).
It is this officer’s involvement in the collection of carved ivory objects that raises another question. From Tuttle to "an old sea captain" to Emmons to Hooper, the involvement of four military- and government-employed men in the trading of ivory goods has been traced through this exhibit. For what reasons would representatives of colonial power, military might, or state interests seek to traffic these particular carved objects out of territorial Alaska?
Then, to ask the larger question: as a result, to what degree is the very act of collecting ivory cribbage boards specifically – the process, the people involved, the reasoning behind it, the effects on museum holdings today – important in understanding them as complicated cultural objects and multifaceted sites of social ordering?
REFERENCES
Low, Jean., De Laguna, Frederica., Emmons, George Thornton., Emmons, George. The Tlingit Indians. United Kingdom: University of Washington Press, 1991
Ray, Dorothy Jean. Graphic Arts of the Alaskan Eskimo. District of Columbia: U.S. Indian Arts and Crafts Board; U.S. Government Printing Office, 1969.
Hutchinson, Elizabeth. “Bow Drills.” MESSAGES ACROSS TIME AND SPACE: INUPIAT DRAWINGS FROM THE 1890S AT COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY.” 2015a: https://edblogs.columbia.edu/AHISG4862_001_2015_1/iii-class-research/inupiat-aesthetics/inupiaq-material-culture-in-conversation-with-the-avery-properties-drawings/the-drill-bow-and-the-inupiaq-graphic-tradition/
Hutchinson, Elizabeth. “ Angokwazhuk (Happy Jack) and Guy Kakarook.” MESSAGES ACROSS TIME AND SPACE: INUPIAT DRAWINGS FROM THE 1890S AT COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY.” 2015b: https://edblogs.columbia.edu/AHISG4862_001_2015_1/iii-class-research/inupiat-aesthetics/inupiat-art-and-artists/happy-jack-and-guy-karakuk/
National Museum of the American Indian. “George Emmons.” Smithsonian. Retrieved June 1, 2022: https://americanindian.si.edu/collections-search/archives/components/sova-nmai-ac-001-ref1574S5
Worrall, Simon. “How the Discovery of Two Lost Ships Solved an Arctic Mystery.” National Geographic, 2017: https://www.nationalgeographic.com/adventure/article/franklin-expedition-ship-watson-ice-ghosts