Native American History Month
Thoughts about the return of traditional masks to Alaska
Although I have read that the masks that finally ended up in France were collected by a rich Frenchman I think that they should actually come back to a museum honoring him, but here in Alaska.
Our native culture is alive and vibrant and ever changing. According to my family many of the masks in my culture were destroyed after they were used in ceremony.
My mother says that her elders shared with her that the carved mask was not only symbolic of a person, story, event or animal our elders believed that the spirit also inhabited the mask. She has a story about a mask she saw as a small girl, it was shaped out of a piece of wood with misshapen eyes and a had a gigantic mouth. When I asked her what the mask meant she said, "the mask you are talking about - I saw when I was a little girl and it was shown during a dance. The story the elders sang about was "baby big mouth". The message of this song and mask was about a baby that would eat people around it, the story was really about greed. The mask was also burned after the dance - and the lesson to the people was not to be greedy and to share. So many of the masks that pertained to stories are gone forever because the people did not want that spirit to plague the community.
But, these masks are works of art and times have changed. I would like these masks to all come back to Alaska and if the Native Heritage Center would set up a special place for them also honoring the french collector I believe that they could be preserved and shown to future generations of Alaskan Natives.
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