Kalikaliyararput: Our Way of Making a Book

From 1993 to 1995 air anthropologist, representatives of file Yup'ik community, and museum professionals worked together to create a unique exhibit of Yup'ik masks. The Agayuliyararput exhibit - opening in the village of 'I'oksook Bay in January 1996, moving to the regional center of Bethel for a two-month stay, in May traveling to Anchorage for five months, and then moving on to several Lower Forty-Eight ventus- celebrates not only masks but the unique view of the world of the Yup'ik people who created them.
The idea for the exhibit was born in 1989. That year I had the opportunity to visit several museums on the East Coast containing Yup'ik collections. I came away amazed by what I found. Brick and glass buildings thousands of miles from Alaska contained masks unlike ally I had seen, including masks in pairs and masks made to be worn by women. I knew that what I had found would interest friends and colleagues in Alaska. When I returned I shared my excitement with Pat Wolf, director of the Anchorage Museum. I asked her if we could bring the masks home for an exhibit, and she answered enthusiastically, "Sure, why not?"At the same time I was discovering Yup'ik masks in museum collections, Andy Paukan and Tim Troll were uncovering treasures closer to home, specifically the things Sheldon Jackson had collected at Andreafski in the 1890s and deposited at the museum in Sitka bearing his name. Tim Troll and Andy Paukan went to Sitka with Yukon elders Willie Beans and Wassilie Evan to choose one hundred objects to bring to the Yukon River community of Mountain Village, where they would be exhibited during a four-day dance festival. Their interest in the masks and other artifacts in the Jackson collection was far from academic. For Andy Paukan and the Yukon village elders, these things were the tangible remains of a fragile heritage, much of which younger generations had all but forgotten. Their hope was to use these "objects of myth and memory" as part of a grassroots effort to foster pride and self-awareness among the descendants of their makers. The Mountain Village exhibit did this, and much more.
Andy Paukan's and Tim Troll's interest in bringing home "captured heritage" and my excitement over buried treasures in museums might have remained discrete had it not been for a mutual friend, Father Rene Astruc. Father Astruc has worked in southwestern Alaska for more than thirty years, first as a village priest and more recently as head of the Jesuit Native Deacon Program. Father Astruc's own life mirrors the Native on Program's efforts to bring the best of the Yup'ik past into the modern Catholic Church: he is a priest as well as an experienced Yup'ik dancer. Father Astruc attended the Mountain Village festival and exhibit. Several years later he heard me describe the masks I had seen during my travels and invited me to the Jesuit House to meet Andy Paukan and Tim Troll. Within a week we met again with Pat Wolf, and a exhibit was born. We would bring Yup'ik masks bacl( to Alaska, exhibiting them first in the Yukon-Kuskokwim villages in which they were made and then in Anchorage for all Alaskans to appreciate.
The depth of feeling that the return of the masks evokes for the Yup'ik community is apparent in the title they gave the exhibit: Agayuliyararput: Our Way of Making Prayer. On Nunivak Island agayu originally meant "mask," and the verb phrase agayuliluteng meant "they making masks" to request that animals and plants be plentiful in the coming year. As Christian missionaries' suppression of masked dancing began at the end of the nineteenth century, the verb base agayu- evolved can "to pray" or "to worship." Agayuliyararput, as applied to the return of the masks, evokes both the old and new meanings of the word in a single phrase.
Unlike past American exhibits, Agayuliyararput opens in a village and in a cosmopolitan center. The exhibit's opening at a large dance festival recalls the social context in which Yup'ik masks were originally shown. Also unlike previous exhibits, Agayuliyararput frames the presentationof the masks in Yup'ik terms, drawing on the detailed remembrances of Yup'ik elders born in the first decades of the 1900s, who saw the last masked dances before missionary efforts forced their decline. Few remain who can describe these events, and their remembrances rarely been recorded. Thus, the exhibit has involved a great deal of research - work that had to be done now or never.
In February 1993 Marie Meade and I met with elders at the annual St. Marys Potlatch. We interviewed half a dozen people there and several more the following January in Bethel. After that, Marie carried out interviews on her own. My job was to visit museums and photograph what I found. Marie visited elders and showed them pictures, asking specific questions about the masks and what they meant. Marie and I shared what we learned. I encouraged her to pursue specific questions, and site determined which directions to follow. None of what follows would ever have been recorded without Marie's dedication to this work and her sensitive listening, hour after hour, to what older Yup'ik men and women had to say.
The results of Marie's research have gone beyond our highest hopes, culminating in more than thirty hours of taped interviews with elders from all over southwestern Alaska. She carefully transcribed and translated that material, producing several thousand pages of transcripts in Yup'ik and English. I studied the transcripts, quoting from them extensively in The Living Tradition of Yupik Masks (University of Washington Press, 1996), the book I wrote to accompany the Agayuliyararput exhibit. December 1994 1 submitted a six-hundred page manuscript to the Press, including one-hundred pages of stories describing masks and masked dancing in both Yup'ik and English.
As I wrote The Livng Tradition, I kept a running file in Yup'ik and English of all statements I quoted from the transcripts. I knew that the long passages in my original manuscript would require editing so as not to interrupt the literary flow for the English catalog's intended audience-the general public-and I wanted to retain a complete, uncut, record of what the elders had said.'
Even after I edited the manuscript, the catalog remained long, and it became clear that Marie and I had written not one but two books. My rendering, emphasizing the masks' visual component, communicated the elders' personal statements in an abbreviated fashion. But the longer accounts and stories had value in their own right, emphasizing the masks' verbal component. Together, the elders had authored their own book about maskmaking and masked dancing, and many readers will find it more compelling than the translated, summary accounts.
At first we called this second book our "Yup'ik catalog." Certainly it will interest the Yup'ik audience who visits the mask exhibit, especially the many younger men and women who have never heard these stories. But like The Living Tradition of Yupik Masks, it, too, is aimed at a national audience, including linguists, folklorists, anthropologists, historians, and other scholars concerned with Native American oral tradition. Art historians and specialists interested in Yup'ik and Inupiat art and ceremony also will appreciate the full accounts of the masks' meanings and the stories they tell. This book is written for those interested in not only what the elders have to say, but also how they say it.
Dividing a single book into two was not an ideal solution, as the original unity made an essential point: we base what we know on the elders' narratives. The separation did, however, offer advantages. The quoted material could be presented uncut. Ironically, the editorial need to rid the English text of repetition has a parallel in the masks' own history. The most famous example is the pairs of masks Kuskokwim trader A. H. Twitchell collected and sold to George Heye in the early 190Os. Heye viewed the pairs as redundant and deaccessioned the extras. Unlike the lost pairs, however, this book provides a safe harbor for the special information jettisoned in the interests of communication to a wider audience.
This is the first time anywhere in the world that an exhibit of Alaska Native material has been accompanied by a book written, essentially, by Native elders. As editor, I helped Marie choose the stories and accounts that best described masks and masked dancing, but beyond this introduction, readers will learn what they learn from the elders'descriptions.
Few exhibits in the continental United States, and none in Alaska, have begun in a village and closed in New York. This bilingual book is equally innovative, providing Yupik oratory and first-person accounts by Yup'ik elders instead of anthropological analysis of Yup'ik art and ceremony by a non-Native. I am a non-Native anthropologist, and my writing has its time and place. This is not one of them.
Two of the Agayuliyararput exhibit's three primary venues are Yup'ik communities whose members speak Yup'ik as a first language. Yup'ik is the second most commonly spoken Native language in the United States and the third most common in North America north of Mexico, following Navajo and Inuktitut. More than twenty thousand people live in southwestern Alaska, and more than half speak Yup'ik as their first language. In a fourth of the seventy Yup'ik villages, Yup'ik is the first language of everyone, from the eldest to the youngest. Producing this book is not an academic exercise-it is a matter of respect. The men, women, and children who attend the exhibit in Toksook Bay and Bethel will be much more interested in what their elders have to say about masks than in my summary accounts, and this book has been designed with their interests in mind.
Paul John, Andy Paukan, and other members of the Yup'ik steering committee that guided this exhibit from its inception adamantly stated the importance to them of their language being front and center along with their masks. In the English-first world of Anchorage, they are made to feel like second-class citizens at every turn. The Agayuliyararput exhibit is an expression of Yup'ik pride, a gift to Native and non-Native viewers alike. Their ancestors made the masks, their elders explained their meaning, and this book makes these gifts available to those interested in a uniquely Yup'ik form. Yup'ik students and non-Native students of Yup'ik language and culture can enjoy this book for what it is-remembrances of masks and masked dancing by the last people to view and participate in them. We have tried to let these men and women speak for themselves. Turn to the ords of the experts, and they will explain how masks came to be agayu1iyararput, "our way of making prayer."

Ann Fienup-Riordan
May 1995
Cost: $15.

Information about the resource can be found at:

ANKN Clearinghouse P.O. Box 756730 Fairbanks, AK 99775-6730 Tel: (907) 474-5897 or email: ANKN Clearinghouse

Charles Kashatok Yup'ik Curriculum Specialist P.O.Box 305 Bethel, Alaska 99559 Tel: (907) 543-4853 or email: Charles_Kashatok@fc.lksd-do.org

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