Hinchinbrook Island / Nutshuk (Nuchek), Prince William Sound, Alaska, United States, North America
Accession Date:
10 Feb 1894
Notes:
FROM CARD: "WOODEN." Illus. Fig. 11, p. 22 in Crowell, Aron, Amy F. Steffian, and Gordon L. Pullar. 2001. Looking both ways: heritage and identity of the Alutiiq people. Fairbanks, Alaska: University of Alaska Press.
Source of the information below: Smithsonian Arctic Studies Center Alaska Native Collections: Sharing Knowledge website, by Aron Crowell, entry on this artifact http://alaska.si.edu/record.asp?id=271, retrieved 9-6-2012: Box, Sugpiaq (Alutiiq), Chugach. yaasiik "box" - Language: Chugach Sugpiaq (Prince William Sound dialect) Covered boxes were made by heating and bending thin planks of wood, to hold water and food for kayak journeys and household storage. Hot rocks could be added to the box to bring its contents to a boil. This bentwood box from Prince William Sound has a tight-fitting lid and is scored and painted in geometric patterns. "They shape it and make a cover for it out of the same material ... Birch tree - you could bend it, so it was soft wood, taken from the tree soft. Then it hardens up, it dries up, and it forms like this." - Ignatius Kosbruk, Sugpiaq (Alutiiq), 1997.
This object is on loan to the Anchorage Museum at Rasmuson Center, from 2010 through 2027.
Listed on page 29 in "The Exhibits of the Smithsonian Institution at the Panama-Pacific International Exposition, San Francisco, California, 1915", in section "Family Group of the Western Eskimo, Alaska".
