Northwest Indian Art

Wood

On the coast of the Bering Sea, "wood" meant driftwood and was a seasonal commodity which arrived on it's own schedule. Rainfall and flooding in Alaska's wooded interior might provide a glut of driftwood on the coast many months later. Some years there was no wood at all.

Hat Ornament in the shape of a man's head
Carved, painted wood. Late 18th Century H. 2 in.

Perhaps because of this scarcity, driftwood became one of the Eskimo's most expressive mediums. Masks, tools and utilitarian objects such as floats for fishing nets were carved of it, because it was lightweight and easily shaped with stone tools. Because of wood's fragility, carved objects from the South Bering Sea cultures are extremely rare.

Bowl carved in the shape of a man
Driftwood. Late 18th Century L.8.75, H.6.5 in.

Tlingit Fetish Objects
6.5", carved, painted wood with attached Human hair.
Collected Skagway, 1880

Because of wood's fragility, carved objects from the South Bering Sea cultures are extremely rare. Many of the items shown here were collected in the latter part of the 19th Century, before such items were created for trade and souvenirs. The area was largely unknown and completely unexplored until well after the American Civil War. When the first expedition to the Upper Bering Sea was mounted in the late 1870's, the inhospitable terrain offered it's leader, Michael Nelson of the Smithsonian Museum, many unexpected challenges, many of them directly related to the scarcity of wood.

When Nelson established his base in St. Michaels near Stuart Island, fuel for heating was a major problem, since the windswept coast of the Bering Sea. was treeless for hundreds of miles in all directions.

Expeditions to the forested interior of the mainland were never easy and rarely provided much useful fuel, because the green Alaska timber required months of aging and drying before it would burn. One night, the men of the expedition were awakened by a noise coming from the Unalakleet River near their basecamp, "Which sounded like a hundred locomotives."

The next morning they awoke to the sight of thousands of large trees littering the beach directly in front of their encampmant and the sound of dozens of Eskimos hacking away at the pile with stone and metal axes, quickly stowing it into their boats. By the end of the day, the tide came in and "Completely cleared the beach of anything the Eskimos had left."