Today's blog comes from Candace Weir, Central Library staff:
Words fade away,
Like hills in fog.
(from a Netsilik Inuit song)
To me, small and precious link together naturally. They also describe the objects from a new book, Upside down: arctic realities, by Edmund Carpenter.
Imagine the carver hunched over a small piece of ivory with a piece of bone or sharp stone teasing the image of a seal or a bear from the material. The tool follows the curves of the form and incises lines: stories in bone or ivory or wood.
Some of the wonderful little objects were made and discarded by peoples long since vanished. They were not made to be kept; they were made to be magical.
What we can put into a curio cabinet, they drew from their imaginations to serve some long forgotten purpose, dreamed of in a land where the sky was the same colour as the land or the sea. The carver “…must reveal form in order to protest against a universe that is formless, and the form he reveals should be beautiful.”
Small in size but monumental in content, most of these objects would fit into a hand. There are delicate little animals, an Ekven ivory carving that looks like a spaceship, masks, heads and little females with steatopygic hips. They served a purpose and fell away, like the cultures that produced them.
Canadian poet Al Purdy wrote the beautiful and evocative Lament for the Dorsets which celebrates the richness of lost cultures.
If you are intrigued with these stories, I also recommend A Dream in Polar Fog by Yuri Rytkheu. The novel gives clear and moving insight into traditional Siberian Yupik life as seen through the eyes of a marooned Canadian sailor in the late 1800s. Rytkheu wrote in both Chukchi and Russian and is considered the father of Chukchi literature.