{"id":16996,"date":"2015-11-18T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2015-11-18T00:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/live-hakamagwp.pantheonsite.io\/news\/parka-and-fashionista"},"modified":"2017-10-27T20:15:28","modified_gmt":"2017-10-27T20:15:28","slug":"parka-and-fashionista","status":"publish","type":"custom_quick","link":"https:\/\/hakaimagazine.com\/article-short\/parka-and-fashionista\/","title":{"rendered":"A Parka and a Fashionista"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u201cCan you see anything?\u201d<\/em> Henry Carter was asked in 1923 as he peered into King Tutankhamun\u2019s tomb. \u201cYes,\u201d he replied, \u201cwonderful things.\u201d This column explores other wonderful things\u2014intriguing artifacts or technologies that give insight into coastal cultures.<\/em><\/p>\n

Around 1923 or perhaps a little earlier, one of the Yup\u2019ik inhabitants of remote St. Lawrence Island in the Bering Sea decided to sell this fine ceremonial parka to Arnold Liebes, a furrier from a prominent California family. The Liebes owned a string of Arctic trading posts, as well as an elegant department store near Union Square in San Francisco: Arnold Liebes knew all about high-end fashion and style. So on one of his trips to northern Alaska, he purchased this classic Yup\u2019ik parka fashioned from bleached walrus intestine and ornamented with plumes and orange beak parts from crested auklets.<\/p>\n

St. Lawrence Island lies more than 250 kilometers southwest of Nome, Alaska, and for nearly 2,500 years, the Yup\u2019ik people and their ancestors hunted whales, walruses, and other sea mammals along its inlets and fished for salmon and halibut along its coast. With little access to cloth even in the early 20th century, Yup\u2019ik women tailored fine, fitted clothing from the materials that surrounded them in their everyday life\u2014animal furs, skins, and intestines.<\/p>\n

By tradition, Yup\u2019ik women chose the small intestines of bearded seals or walruses\u2014a material they called gutskin\u2014to make rain parkas. (A bearded seal yielded some 22 meters of gutskin, about enough for one parka; the larger walrus produced nearly twice as much material.) First, the women meticulously cleaned the intestines. Then they slit the tubelike organ lengthwise and cut it into sections, sewing one piece to another so that the gut\u2019s outer surface always would face the elements in the finished parka. In doing so, the women took advantage of basic anatomy: the gut\u2019s exterior layer repels water, but it allows vapor from the inside to escape outward.<\/p>\n

In essence, waterproof gutskin breathed. \u201cIt was the Gore-Tex of the day,\u201d says Ellen Carlee, a PhD candidate at the University of Fairbanks, who is studying traditional uses of gutskin.<\/p>\n

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Image courtesy of the National Museum of the American Indian, Smithsonian Institution (123404.000). Photo by NMAI Photo Services<\/p><\/div>\n

The man\u2019s parka purchased by Liebes was designed for important ceremonial occasions, not the rough and tumble of daily Arctic life. So the maker bleached the intestine. First she inflated it; then she placed it outdoors in winter to freeze. \u201cAnd when that freezing happened,\u201d says Angela Linn, senior collections manager of ethnology and history at the University of Alaska Museum of the North, \u201cit changed the intestine into an opaque material, and it became like parchment.\u201d<\/p>\n

Then came the biggest challenge: a Yup\u2019ik woman had to stitch the pieces together very carefully. \u201cIf you have no experience in this,\u201d says Elaine Kingeekuk, a Yup\u2019ik elder and gutskin sewer who now lives in Anchorage, \u201cit\u2019s a difficult material to work with. It\u2019s like trying to sew tissue paper.\u201d As a girl, Kingeekuk struggled to get the stitching right, raising her mother\u2019s ire when she made a mistake. \u201cI started trying to make a stitch and it would break through or be too big, and sometimes it would rip right through.\u201d<\/p>\n

The parka shown above, in the collection of the National Museum of the American Indian in Washington, D.C., has several stylish touches, from a baby-walrus-fur trim to the sealskin strips adorning the hood. But the most impressive ornaments are the small orange beaks and black feathery crests from crested auklets. \u201cThat just blows me away,\u201d says Linn. \u201cEach auklet has only one of those crests. So not only is it something beautiful, the crests also show that someone is a very good hunter.\u201d<\/p>\n

According to Kingeekuk, such fine ceremonial parkas are no longer worn today on St. Lawrence Island, but she and other Yup\u2019ik elders are trying to keep alive the tradition of working with gutskin. Kingeekuk herself eventually came to master the art of stitching the parchment-like material, and she has given workshops on the technique in Alaska. Several years ago, when curators at the National Museum of the American Indian needed to find someone to repair tears and rips in the auklet-crest-adorned parka, they called her.<\/p>\n

\u201cI was fortunate and happy to do that,\u201d Kingeekuk says. \u201cIt was a special thing, and I felt like I was a surgeon doing surgery on a living person.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Designers for the Paris runways have nothing on the seamstresses of the Bering Sea\u2019s St. Lawrence Island.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":12974,"menu_order":0,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"acf":{"hero_video_url":null,"hero_video_caption":"","deck":"Designers for the Paris runways have nothing on the seamstresses of the Bering Sea\u2019s St. Lawrence Island.","authors_group":[{"by_group":"by","contributors_group":[15554]}],"word_count_override":"","podbean1":"","podbean2":"","redirect":"","geolocation":{"address":"63.253096, -169.8287","lat":63.253096,"lng":-169.8287},"related":[16213,18051],"twitterimage":14519,"facebookimage":14019,"twitterdescription":"","edited":"","factchecked":"","code":"","no_old_story_flag":[]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/hakaimagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/article-short\/16996"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/hakaimagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/article-short"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/hakaimagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/custom_quick"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/hakaimagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/article-short\/16996\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":20003,"href":"https:\/\/hakaimagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/article-short\/16996\/revisions\/20003"}],"acf:post":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hakaimagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/videos-visuals\/18051"},{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hakaimagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/features\/16213"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hakaimagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/12974"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/hakaimagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=16996"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hakaimagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=16996"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hakaimagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=16996"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}