Anchorage Daily News

BETHEL -- Ten years ago, Marie Meade joined a group of Yup'ik elders on a trip to visit distant museum collections. The traveling elders studied long-lost artifacts squirreled away in places far from their Southwest Alaska origins.

Their quest brought them as far as the Ethnologisches Museum in Berlin, where they held in their hands the everyday items of a time when Yup'ik life was different.

Those museum visits allowed for a "reconnecting," said Meade of Nunapitchuk, who accompanied the group during its 1997 visit.

The elders had a "wish and hope that some day they (the items) would come home," Meade said.

This month, in Bethel, they did come home, at least for now. An exhibit of about 80 artifacts, many of them loaned from far-off museums, opened to the public after about 200 people attended an opening ceremony in Yup'ik and English.

The exhibit, of harpoons, fish traps, weaving, clothing, photographs and more, is different than those of generations past.

It is not a display of anthropologists' notions about a Yup'ik past. The interpreters of "Yuungnaqpiallerput -- The Way We Genuinely Live: Masterworks of Yup'ik Science and Survival" are telling stories about themselves, drawn from their own memory.

Us, not them. The tellers are the elders of today's Yup'ik people.

"They really wanted the exhibit to showcase our way of life, the way that we live today and in the past," said Ann Rearden of Napakiak, a translator with the Calista Elders Council. "Like some of the elders say, they didn't live life in a disorganized fashion. And I think some of the items showcase that talent and attention to detail."

The exhibit displays artifacts reflecting the scientific understanding inherent in traditional Yup'ik life, and the detail with which tools and clothing are built is something to note.

But "The Way We Genuinely Live" is as much a collection of stories. The project collected Yup'ik oral histories, translated them into English, and published these words with their artifacts.

"Elders are like the channels for those stories to come through," Meade said. This is the way "we make a connection to our ancestors."

Visitors reading about the swan-foot skin bag, for instance, will share in an elder's undisguised delight at discovering a piece that embodies the creativity necessary in early Yup'ik life.

Upon seeing the bag for the first time, one elder remarked, "The makers were very skillful, making something out of nothing." Words such as these accompany the artifacts.

A centerpiece is a kayak built just as the late Frank Andrew of Kwigillingok built his own.

Fashioned from pieces cut from driftwood white spruce carried far onto the silty beaches of the Kuskokwim River delta, it is a craft of clean lines and tight joints. Its fasteners are sealskin and wooden pegs sometimes secured with a wedge of antler.

It is a new kayak, built by Noah Andrew Sr., Bill Wilkinson and Ethan Wilkinson -- all family members of the prototype's builder. Its frame is brushed with a solution of red ochre -- the volcanic mineral collected from the rock of Nelson Island.

Building these kayaks in a woodshop in Kwigillingok, Noah Andrew Sr. said, teaches him "how our ancestors used to survive, travel, and how genius they were."

Myron Naneng told the audience that the parkas in the exhibit reminded him of his own in childhood, one made of the skins of king eider.

He recalled "the warmth that that parka gave me during the cold winter days."

Limited by space constraints, the Bethel exhibit shows just a third of the 240 artifacts that will fill the Anchorage Museum when it opens there in December.

From there, "Yuungnaqpiallerput" will travel to the state museum in Juneau and the American Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C.

Meade hopes the work of the Masterworks organizers -- the Calista Elders Council and the Anchorage Museum -- brings a remembrance to contemporary Yup'ik life because "there's a lot of disconnection in our people today."

Though the artifacts left their Yup'ik homes, Meade said she harbors no ill feelings towards those who've kept them for so many years.

"We're very grateful that they've been cared for and have been protected," she said. "Maybe they were taken away to come back some day to help heal our people."