Alaska Native art

Alaska Native cultures are rich and diverse, and their art forms are representations of their history, skills, tradition, adaptation, and nearly twenty thousand years of continuous life in some of the most remote places on earth.

It was not until Europeans and Asians first made contact with the indigenous people of coastal Alaska in the 17th century that such non-utilitarian art objects began to be traded in exchange for metal implements, cloth, and foodstuffs such as tea, flour, or sugar.

For example, a walrus tusk might be etched with many hunting scenes depicting life of the coastal people; later, this technique would come to be known as "scrimshaw" when brought back to New England on whaling ships.

Elaborate patterns in beadwork were designed as the beads themselves arrived through trade; regalia of all types used for ceremonial purposes – masks, woven clothing, hats, dance fans – all became souvenirs for the whalers and explorers of the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries.

Even the towering totem poles from Southeastern Alaska found their way back to the East Coast of the United States, where they formed the basis of many museum collections.

While the art forms were and still are as different as the cultures of the Native people who made them – Athabaskan Indians of the vast Interior, Inupiaq of the Northwestern Arctic coasts; Yupik and St. Lawrence Island Yupik of the Bering Sea coast; Aleuts and Alutiiq people from the Aleutian islands; and the Tlingit, Haida and Tsimshian Indians often known as Northwest Coastal tribes – they commonly evoke references to living in harmony with nature and all its many creatures.

Wall-size paintings, three-dimensional mobiles, life-size bronze castings and marble sculptures, to name just a few categories, fill galleries alongside bears carved from whalebones, cribbage boards honed from full-length walrus tusks, fine jewelry etched of copper and silvers; Nephrite jade and musk ox horn polished into bracelets, bentwood boxes carved from coastal white cedar trees; and baskets of infinite shapes and designs, from birch bark or woven spruce root, beach grasses or the baleen from a bowhead whale, all intricately woven and shaped into vessels of all sizes.

The Inupiat tribes create useful tools such as bows, arrows, harpoons, float discs, snow beaters, boot sole creasers, skin scrapers, fat removers, spoons, handles, rope, belts and other clothing from materials they find locally.