Maxilla of a Walrus
Hood Museum of Art | Walrus Ivory, Bone, and Teeth | Collected from Ye Olde Curiosity Shop, Seattle, for Ripley's "Believe It or Not!"
Image Credit: Hood Museum of Art
Be Amazed. Be Amused. Be Curious!
The Origins, Materiality, Carving, Collection, and Display of Ivory as a Colonial Enterprise
Swooping from the recognizably snout-like mask of the skull, tapering to jaggedly broken ends, and twisting across one another, the tusks of this walrus are massive: two feet long and about as thick as a human wrist. The specimen is unusual. The tusks collide dully, tangled at their tips; this crossed set would not have been much use to a walrus digging for food or fending off an attacker.
But then again, this unusualness is part of the walrus’ general allure in the first place. A male Pacific walrus weighs up to 1.75 tons, sports a hide nearly two inches thick, lives in herds of 100 animals, and can dive to distances of 260 feet (The Editors of Encyclopedia Britannica 2020). Its body can supply pounds of blubber, hide, and ivory – each material deeply useful to 19th-century Alaskan Native communities, especially of the western coast.
To the gold-seeking settlers moving to the Department of Alaska in the 1890s, these animals were exciting, their use in indigenous objects fascinating, and their tusks of special financial interest. Ivory, as a colonial good beyond compare, makes for an especially apt souvenir – such as a cribbage board culled from the skeleton of the strange, slain beast pictured here. In this way, one might read the sheer materiality of an ivory cribbage board as part and parcel of the colonial project: to tame the wild, to claim nature, and to write oneself into the historical narrative. The inscription of cribbage markings onto ivory tusks then, coupled with the purportedly exotic imagery of Alaskan Native culture featured on them, is the ideal, personalized, necessitated colonial trophy – one that writes a hierarchy in bone.
Recall, too, the “Made by European” tag affixed to the cribbage board at the beginning of this exhibition; if white hands perform the carving, is the act of inscribing a walrus tusk with an “Old World” game rendered inherently destructive?
According to the Hood Museum’s web page, this particular maxilla was purchased at Ye Olde Curiosity Shoppe in Seattle. This store, a cross between souvenir shop and exhibition space for spectacular curios, supplied artifacts for museums ranging from the American Natural History Museum to the Royal Ontario Museum at the turn of the century (Sheldon Jackson Museum 2013). Today, it features its famous mummy and a four-legged chicken on display alongside stereotypical Alaskan Native artifacts; its motto reads: “Be Amazed. Be Amused. Be Curious!” (Ye Olde Curiosity Shoppe 2022).
In this context, this maxilla take on new meaning. That Alaskan Native artifacts were collected alongside and now are displayed alongside skeletal remains falsely suggests that these still-vibrant cultures, too, are long gone. That these objects are considered to be in the categorical company of the weird, the spectacular, and the delighftully disgusting is offensive. Ivory, then, can play a role in erasing, spectacularizing, and othering indigenous cultures.
Note, finally, that this souvenir trade may have contributed to the thinning of walrus populations, which declined so rapidly that walruses dwindled dangerously close to endangered status by the 1960s (World Wildlife Fund 2018). Were the colonial implications and impact of ivory cribbage boards and other collectibles so severe, then, that this souvenir trade nearly succeeded in depleting an essential material aspect of many Alaskan Native cultures?
Image Credit: The Eskimo Bulletin, Library of Congress
References
Sheldon Jackson Museum. “November Artifact of the Month: Cribbage Board.” Alaska Department of Education and Early Development. 2013: https://museums.alaska.gov/documents/sjm/artifacts/2013/nov_2013.pdf
The Editors of Encyclopedia Britannica. "walrus." Encyclopedia Britannica, March 18, 2020. https://www.britannica.com/animal/walrus.
The Eskimo Bulletin (Cape Prince of Wales, Alaska). Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers. Lib. of Congress. July 1, 1897: <https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn96060045/1897-07-01/ed-1/seq-3/>
World Wildlife Fund. “Climate change puts the Pacific Walrus population on thin ice.” 2018: https://www.worldwildlife.org/stories/climate-change-puts-the-pacific-walrus-population-on-thin-ice
Ye Olde Curiosity Shoppe. “Home.” Retrieved June 3, 2022: https://museums.alaska.gov/documents/sjm/artifacts/2013/nov_2013.pdf