Jack L. Davis

Becoming Coyote by Wayne Ude (review)

Along with Ray’s earlier volume, Eskimo Art: Tradition and Innovaxad tion in North Alaska, this book draws on over thirty years of research and observation by the author, the pair of books constituting a kind of magnum opus on the subject. This newly-published work is large, handsomely proxad duced and richly illustrated with museum-quality photographs to supplement the comprehensively detailed text. The historical research in this book is impressive and is balanced by the results of painstaking fieldwork that reveals a genuine interest in the artisans as well as the artifacts. The author shows the progression of style and techxad nique up to the present and includes work by contemporary college-trained artists as well as work by more traditional village craftspeople. A primary concern is the influence of European contact and cultural change on the existing artistic traditions of the Eskimos and Aleuts and the persistence of certain ideas and forms despite vast alterations in traditional culture. As a reference for serious students and collectors in this field, this book and the companion volume would be invaluable. The text, while detailed, is straightforward and would not prove difficult for the general reader. The 210 illustrations include artist’s renderings, museum plates and numxad erous photographs, all of which are enhanced by superb reproduction and supported by extensive appendices, an index and a massive bibliography. Now that the industrial designer and the computer-controlled factory have largely replaced the artisan as the source of our inventory of material goods, it is somehow humbling to consider the vast patience needed to wed the necessities of daily living to the artistic impulse. The work shown here is above all a testimony to the inner resources of the Eskimo and Aleut people and merits appreciation and respect.

Frank Waters and the Native American Consciousness

Several years ago during a televised interview series conducted by John R. Milton, the distinguished Southwestern writer Frank Waters was asked why he wrote so much about Indians. He replied simply: “I can answer only that I have lived with Indians all of my life and they interest me. And I probably justify it rationally by saying that, after all, we are all interested in our relationship to our land, to our own earth, and the Indians are indigenous to this continent. The Indian is much different from our European white, so I think that we have a great deal to learn from their expression of it in their own idiom.”1