JOSEPH SENUNGETUK (Inusunaaq)Inupiaq Born: Wales, 1940 Current residence: Anchorage Personal statement by the artist from "ALASKAMEUT '86, An Exhibit of contemporary Alaska Native Masks" edited by Jan Steinbright, Institute of Alaska Native Arts, 1986, pages 46-47. "I feel I am a tool for a movement, a people, a race, a field of art. I don't feel like I've really had to wonder what to do. Sometimes I just need to sit back and wonder how useful I can be to the cause and the cause is important, once you realize it. I feel the work that I've done, maybe at some point, has saved lives. I've reached young people, given them a purpose for their ownselves when they don't know what to do or don't know what to think about themselves, because I've been there myself. "I was a spectator in some Wales dances, celebrations of successful polar bear hunts. (That was one when I was asked to go out there and dance with the young boys). I have watched traditional Native women's dances. They were just beginning to die out when I was very young, like, six or seven years old. In Nome, my mother used to take me to the King Island dances. She enjoyed them and she always wanted someone to walk with her down to the places where they danced. In the wintertime they practiced on their own. In the summer they performed for the tourists. Those are two different things. The actual dance and the performance for the soul, for the sake of celebrating one's culture is very different from what is produced for the eyes and ears of the tourist. So I've seen both of them and I've always known that there a strength and a purpose that is dying in the ceremonies and in the song, the music, the language and the oral literature where I'm from. So the islanders (King Island) are usually a lot more able to be considered as viable tradition bearers because their religions, their [Christian] priests allowed their language to be retained more so than us mainlanders who were divided up into missionary territories. We were given mainly the Fundamentalists and they scorned very emphatically. They didn't want us to be dealing with shamanism or ceremonies that hinted of shamanism or devil worship. They misunderstood. So that produces within me a hunger, a yearning that these things need to be rediscovered in a positive way. "I think our elders have been very forgiving. For instance, my parents have allowed me to express whatever I want to. My mom has read my book and everything she reads or is aware of happening that sounds like it might be good for the cause or the movement, she'll say, "It's okay but I wish he wasn't so drastically devisive." They want a smoother transition; where the younger people are impatient; are wanting to see change quickly. As I'm growing older, I have a feeling that I'm getting more patient with the idea that if change isn't happening as fast as I want it to, it's my fault. I just have to keep plugging away at doing the things I think are right. But everybody concerned ought to know that art never stays in one place. It always changes. We're going through a very unique period or phase of Native art right now, but it's going to change in the next couple of years. Maybe the whole market is going to be too overloaded with masks. Then someone else will have to be innovative enough, creative enough to read what's happening and go into something else, maybe plastic or laser beam technology or doing art out on a satellite out in space. Somehow it's going to change. "If we express ourselves through three dimensional artwork, maskmaking or sculpturing, we are, in effect, writing our history. People can read chisel marks. People can become expert enough to translate what we are saying. In a way the quality of Native art has expressed change. It has said that we become too aware of the commercial element and then dove right in and began caring for that, so much that we forgot about the spiritual aspects of our art. Right now we're beginning to realize that those two things have to sit side by side. Not one or the other is more important in this day and age. Well, maybe I should put a little more weight on the spiritual aspect of it because that has been left aside so long that the balancing needs to be addressed more so than people can understand it. Even I don't understand it sometimes. I talk about spiritualism but I need to get back to my own little corner and think about it or pray, meditate and in doing so a lot of the answer I thought were real hard or impossible come to me or to anybody who knows how to do that. "We're terribly stereotyped right now as "Native artists." Our effectiveness is very hurt by the stereotyping as to what we do and how we do it and where we display and were we sell. It's all thought of as normal but if you look very closely at it, it's still very abnormal. We're taught more to compete with each other; when our inclination is to cooperate with each other. If it's a Native way, if we work things in some kind of organization formula, if we're using "Native ways" we would be helping each other." |