Tunghak mask

The type of mask presented here is a representation of Tunghak, “The Spirit of Elsewhere / He who lives on the Moon” in the Yup’ik language. Tunghak is the being who rules over mammals and fish. Our mask is part of a pair whose counterpart, collected by an agent of the Alaska Commercial Company before 1897, was donated to the University of California (formerly the Lowie Museum) at the same time (Phoebe.A. Hearst Museum, Inv n°2-4574). These two masks represent a walrus.

According to Sean Mooney and Chuna ^Mcintyre1 “By tradition, Yup’iks masks were often created in pairs or groups of linked masks. The term Yup’ik ilakelriit describes this:
A group of masks linked by a common purpose and story. The structure of Yup’ik dances and songs is very formal, with a fixed number of verses and movements, and these are often presented in a balanced manner, with one responding to the other.
The grouping of masks is linked to this, and the narrative of the dance is represented as the Yua of each mask is invoked”.

According to Johan Adrian ^Jacobsen2, one of the great collectors of Yup’iks masks in the late 19th century, people kept these masks in the qasgiq to ensure good luck and blessings. He describes seeing pairs of “charming images” of similar design.

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, when masks were collected in the field for museums, collectors were not aware or sensitive to such distinctions. To their untrained eyes, many of these masks appeared as duplicates of each other, rather than integral members of pairs or groups.
These pairs of masks were often separated.

These two masks form a pair duplicated by the Master of Nushagak for the needs of the rite, part of the very restricted corpus of symbolic and cosmic representation of primordial walrus-spirits; they gave the shaman the ability to physically approach the goddess of marine animals. SednaThe spirit-animal auxiliary, which had created them, enabled the holder to directly solicit the divinity by visiting it through the vehicle of this spirit-animal auxiliary.

The Nushagak site was originally a center of Russian influence and trade among the Yup’iks of Alaska. In 1890, the village of Nushagak had a population of 268 and was the largest in the Bristol Bay region during the nineteenth century.
But as early as 1899, Edward ^Nelson3, the Smithsonian Institution’s envoy to Alaska, noted the disappearance of Yup’ik beliefs. In addition to the ban on worship imposed by the missionaries who arrived in 1884, an intensive fishing industry was destroying the fragile ecosystem on which the local culture depended – starting with a symbiotic and intangible – sacred – vision of the Yup’ik way of life with nature and its spirits.

And according to Knecht & ^Mossolova4 Introduced diseases swept through the region, wiping out entire villages. By 1838, at least 60% of the Yup’ik population had disappeared. Regional diversity and social distinctions within Yup’ik society had collapsed. In 1900, an influenza epidemic decimated the rest of the population in just three months.

As a community, the village of Nushagak, a haven between the West and the Yup’ik world, was abandoned as early as 1902, due to the establishment of the fisheries, the number of workers and the epidemics. He adds: “The ritual and systematic destruction of the masks alone would explain why no more than twelve masks of the Nushagak Master have come down to us. Historical reports indicate that after being used in a dance ceremony, masks were generally destroyed, broken, burned or abandoned in caves or left to rot on the tundra (i.e. taken far from the village site)”.

While we know approximately when and where the masks in the Phoebe A. Hearst Museum were collected. Hearst Museum, i.e. before 1897, this is not the case for ours.

According to Yup’ik cultural referent Chuna McIntyre, thanks to the discovery and identification in 2019 in the collections of the Jackson Sheldon Museum in Sitka, Alaska, of a Polar Bear pendant mask held at the Phoebe Hearst Museum (Inv 2-4584), this specimen was collected at Cape Prince of Wales by Sheldon Jackson before 1899, almost 900 km as the crow flies north of Nushagak – an unprecedented distance traveled by the object before 1898. This confirms that the Nushagak Master’s replica masks were effectively dispersed over an extremely wide area as early as the 19th century.

As our mask comes from a German collection, it is likely to have been one of the pieces brought back by Jacobsen on his collecting trip to Alaska.

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1- Chuna McIntyre and Sean Mooney. Paitaq, an excerpt from the publication Yua: Henri Matisse and the Inner Arctic Spirit, Earth Song, Heard Museum, Phoenix AZ, October 18, 2018, p.9

2- In 1877, 1878 and 1881, Norwegian sailor Johan Adrian Jacobsen (1853-1947) presented the first Eskimos and Lapps ever seen in Paris at the Jardin d’Acclimatation. He then exhibited them all over Europe. The famous Hagenbeck, for whom he worked, was keen to show not only wild animals, but also natives and samples of their industry in his circus.

This experience as a racer and collector in the far North earned Jacobsen, aged 28, a contract with the Berlin Ethnographic Museum to collect ethnographic and other specimens on the West Coast of North America. Over the next two years, he traveled through British Columbia, the Yukon and Alaska.
He collected around seven thousand objects, many of which went into the German museum. Jacobsen sold the rest to a Berlin antique dealer.

3- Edward Nelson. The Eskimos about Bering Strait, 1899, pp. 398-399

4- Rick Knecht & Anna Mossolova. Excavating Shamanic Objects the Nunalleq Site near the village of Quinhagak, Alaska, University of Cardiff, Theory Archeology Group, 2017

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