Additional Images

Provenance:

Collected by Ruthelle Kingeekek, Savoonga, St. Lawrence Island, AK
Native Hospital Shop, Anchorage, AK
Private Collection, Toronto, ON

Note:

Elaborately embellished with linear designs, and highly sculptural in form, harpoon heads from Old Bering Sea artists were at the intersection of material and spiritual words. Carved with great skill and much difficulty using stone and bone tools, they were implements of necessity. Lodged by force into the body of marine animals, they were required to firmly secure a hunter’s prey to his line. Yet they are also found in ritual and burial contexts, and contain design elements with no apparent functional purpose. It has been suggested, perhaps most prominently in Inua: Spirit World of the Bering Sea Eskimo that their aesthetic attributes may have been designed to “please the spirits” and encourage the willful surrender of prey whose spirits or inua are eternal, and on equal footing with their human counterparts.[1]

Collector’s notes at the time of this lot’s previous consignment to Waddington’s in 2022 indicated that it was purchased from the Native Hospital Shop in Anchorage, Alaska, and excavated on St. Lawrence Island by Yu’pik elder Ruthelle Kingeekek (1941-2007).

[1] William W. Fitzhugh and Susan A. Kaplan, Inua: Spirit World of the Bering Sea Eskimo ( District of Columbia: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1982), 242.