Giyema (Mask), mid-20th century

The ceremony around the mask dance was to strengthen the relationship among the villages and provide some reciprocal hosting. So, I had a tea partner from the community of Grayling and when he would come to Shageluk for the mask dance, I would bring him food at meal times and then when I would go to Grayling, when they were holding their mask dance, he would do the same for me.

...

My name is Beth Leonard. I’m professor and director of Alaska Native studies at the University of Alaska Anchorage. My parents are James and the late Jean Dementi. I was raised in Shageluk and Anvik.

Giyema di’taan means a mask dance is going on. In the language, many of the objects are actually described more as a process rather than an object. The giyema encompasses this particular practice not just the mask themselves.

So it’s an elongated face. The ears are quite prominent. It looks like the person is wearing perhaps snow goggles to shield their eyes from the snow. It looks like perhaps there is a tattoo on the upper lip and then there’s also what looks like to be a feather coming out of the forehead.

The masks would be carved for the dances. And Anvik unfortunately had lost many of their song leaders and dancers in the flu epidemic in the early 1920s so they weren’t singing and dancing when I lived there. But Shageluk and Grayling were having regular mask dances every winter. These masks that they used for the dancing were considered very powerful so they were often stored away from the community. So many of the artists will carve masks in the different designs from the area, and those are the ones that are made for display to hang on your walls.

It says on the caption here that perhaps inspired by their neighbors the Yupiit. So, people from my area are often characterized in anthropological materials as displaced Yup’iks but the languages are very distinct. And I think a lot of the practices, the ceremonial practices, may have been shared across those language borders that exist. So, it wasn’t necessarily a case of borrowing but I think a case of sharing for many of the people around Alaska. The mask dances themselves I think were a time for people to gather and reflect and maintain these ceremonies. And the ceremonies were very much actively suppressed for many years. These ceremonies were important enough for them to resist the objections of missionaries and educators specifically and so for them to be able to carry on these traditions in spite of the active suppression but also the impacts of the epidemics as well is really quite admirable.