Yo-Yo
National Museum of the American Indian | sealskin/fur, glass bead/beads, baleen, sinew | created between 1960-170
Image Credit: National Museum of the American Indian
SOUVENIRS AS SOCIAL-ORDERING
The Bola, the Yo-Yo, and Meaning-Making in Collectibles
Zooming one hundred years forward in time, this intricately sewn toy may also have something to say about the souvenir trade in southern Alaska. This type of object appeared on the shelves of curio shops and trading posts relatively recently – in their perhaps even more stereotype-reinforcing 20th century iterations – according to Dorothy Jean Ray (Klistoff 2007). This yo-yo includes no ivory, though the baleen used to hold the two stuff-ed sealskin spheres together ensures that this souvenir item still incorporates rare animalia. Klistoff (2007) finds that such tourist souvenir staples are derived from the bola hunting device used by Alaskan Natives to bring down game, although this is a slightly contested finding.
Image Credit: Evening Star, Library of Congress.
If verified, this appropriation of a traditional hunting method for souvenir sale as a child’s game suggests that the souvenir market can also be a site for the imposition of settler visions of what is interesting, valuable, and marketable on Alaskan Native material culture. See for instance, the above, mid-20th-century, full-page newspaper advertisement, in which a blond, male, white child is seen taking an “ Eskimo Yo-Yo” from a stereotypically dressed Alaskan Native child and quickly mastering its function – much to his delight and much to its owner’s dismay (Evening Star 1961). To what degree can we read the sale of these yo-yos in general as following a similar trajectory? In this version of events, the bola is taken from the history and customs of Alaskan Native people, infantilized and commercialized for sale as a children’s toy, employed to some degree in supporting white supremacy in advertisements, and then collected by museums as an “authentic” Alaskan Native artifact.
What impact would this have on the reading of the ivory cribbage board as reflective of social ordering? This example lends credence to the argument that the inscribing of cribbage markings on Alaskan animalia is a similarly violent colonial project – amounting to the trivialization of traditional Alaskan Native imagery into decorative etchings, the literal physical supremacy of the ordered boxes over that imagery, and the fundamental taming of an exotic animal into a pocket-sized trinket.
REFERENCES
Evening Star (Washington, D.C.),Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers. Lib. of Congress. November 5, 1961: <https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn83045462/1961-11-05/ed-1/seq-152/>
Klistoff, Alyssa J. “Weapon, Toy, Or Art? The Eskimo Yo-Yo As A Commodified Artic Bola And Marker Of Cultural Identity.” University of Alaska Fairbanks, May 2007: https://scholarworks.alaska.edu/bitstream/handle/11122/8567/Klistoff_A_2007.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y