Moore Alutiiq toy-bows

Tried making a few bows out of juniper. Juniper is easy to carve and resilent. Makes for some good kid-bows. Here is one bow I made for my youngest child.

Image 1. Juniper toy-bow and arrow.

Image 2. Adding the last leage of artificial sinew on a 27cm long toy bow.

Image 3. The last strand is pulled under the hitches and then tied on the nock.

Image 4. It´s a fun toy but a bit dangerous due to it´s effectiveness.

Photo credits: Image 1-4, Marcus Lepola.

Using toy-bows to teach arctic bowyery skills

When teaching bowyery skills to others you often also learn new things as you teach. In my case I had a exceptional learing experience when I was visiting the archaeological repository at the Alutiiq museum in Kodiak. I stopped by the museum in between two scheduled archery workshops in Alaska. The first workshop was held in July at the Nutsiiq Spirit camp of 2012, the second one at Alitak Point in August.

Image 1. Toys in a drawer at the Alutiiq museum. The toy bown the top left corner is showing Yupík style recurved ends

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The repository at the Alutiiq museum has a large archaeological collection from mainly the Karluk one site, They also have objects from other Kodiak sites as well. Karluk one was inhabited between 1420 and 1700s and the among the findings there is a wide array of hunting tools as well as toys intended to prepare young children of the Karluk society for their adult lives. Among these toys there were several small toy bow fragments as well as some nicely preserved complete ones. These bows range 35-21cm and represent two sligtly different types of flat bow.

Image 2. Sinew-backing a miniature bow.

I was impressed by these bows and my enthusiasm was also shared by dr. Sven Haakonson Jr.

We quickly realized the potential of these small bows as we were faced with some practical difficulties. Everything we took from Kodiak to the Alitak Point camp had to be hauled in on small plane and boat. We were worried about getting enough bow-billets to the camp workshops as we also had a lot of camping gear that we had to bring in. The miniature bows proved to be an excellent alternative as we were able to bring set up a class with less billets in stock. It is highly likely that a first time bowyer will fail with his first bow and this has to be taken in to account when setting up a bow-building workshop. In Finland I usually make longbows out of ash ranging in the 45-55 pound range. These classes are usually arranged in carpentry shops in schools. In Alitak there were no carpentry shops, also we were working with a material that most bowyers would not bother with: - spruce. For tools we had to settle for axes, small hand planes, knifes and sanding-paper.  

Image 3. Sinew-backed miniature Alutiiq-style bow.

As we were using spruce for bows we also concluded that the bows had to be backed in order to hold together. The original bows were wrapped with braided sinew cord but we settled for barided nylon fishing line.The small bows were backed with artificial sinew line. These small bows proved to be a invaluable method in teaching basic bowyery skills to the participants without destroying lot of valuable spruce billets in the process. Making a functional small bow is technically just as demanding as making real size bows. Bigger bows just require a little more time to make.

Image 4. The bowyery shop at Alitak Point,

Once the Alutak camp was set up we were able to start with our workshop. All participants were required to first produce a functional miniature bow before they were allowed to attempt making a real size bow. This enabled us to controll the skill of the individual participants and avoid unecessary waste of bow woods We produced 14 Alutiiq style bows during the camp of which 12 survived. The real size bows were made out of spruce, the toy bows were carved out of cured yellow cedar. The original model bow for the class is in a Finnish collection in Hämeenlinna and was collected by Hjalmar Furuhjelm in the late 1860s at Nuchek, Prince William Sound.

Image 5. Normal size Alutiiq Archery tackle produced at Alitak.

A novice will use some 2-4 hours making a toy bow, making a big one might take few days.The requirement for setting up a mini-bow workshop are minimal. A makeshift workhsop can be arranged anywhere. Knot free segments of spruce tree branches will suffice for a miniatur bow. 

Later in Kodiak we arranged a bow making workshop at the museum during which we only produced miniature bows with some 30-35 eager students.

Photo credits: Images 1-5, Marcus Lepola 2012.

Replicating Eskimo Bow Technology – Is close enough good enough?

The Eskimo inhabit a wast range of the northern hemisphere. The arctic environment and the limited availability of natural resources influenced the material culture of the Eskimo. The kayak is a good example of how local availability of material for construction, together with the special functions of the kayak influenced the design of the craft. The same rules also apply to the bow and arrow.

The bow is not an "stand alone item" in the toolkit of the Eskimo, it is a narration of the environment and the particular culture from which it emerged. As anthropologists we have to be very conscientious about how we treat and present this narrative. It is our obligation not to disturb or change the narrative as it will only result in a dilution of the traditions we are trying to salvage.

As I have been preparing for my coming ”Alutiiq bowyery” trip to Alaska next summer, I have also been looking at number of written sources on Eskimo bow replication. There are not that many of them, but the name Errett Callahan keeps popping up in my browser. Dr. Errett Callahan is an renowned anthropologist/primitive technology specialist. In the late 1980s he was engaged in a project to teach the Inuit of Belcher Island traditional skills such as arctic bow making. Callahan's assignment was to recreate a bow similar to what had been used during the heyday of Arctic bow hunting and to later use the recreated bow in a actual caribou hunt. The project was published in three different articles in Primitive Technology II, Ancestral Skills 2001.

The bow Callahan replicated, a bow from Bristol Bay (plate 2 Murdoc).

As such the project is interesting and the finished bow along with detailed sketches produced a lot of practical information on Eskimo bow-technology. But there are also some issues with this project which need to be discussed in retrospect. Even if the project involved Canadian Inuit, Callahan focused on western Eskimo bows due to reasons of practicality, and thus ignoring the East Arctic bows all together. In his article he admits to cutting corners and in order to make a bow type he felt more comfortable re-producing, in this case a Yup´ík bow from Bristol Bay.

Is this a big deal? Yes, in my opinion, since going about projects in this careless manner is a distortion of bow making traditions that the anthropologist is trying to preserve in an given area. The bow Callahan replicated really has no similarities to bows in the Baffin Island area. The cable backing technique reproduced by Callahan is of the Southern Type (Murdoc 1890). This type of backing is different from the Arctic Type (Murdoc 1890) used in the East Arctic. Bows from this area were typically made out of antler which means that they had to be put together of several different pieces. The bow that Callahan reproduced was originally made out of one piece of spruce or larch (not ash). The Yup´ik of Alaska had better access to driftwood than the Inuit of the central Canadian Arctic and could more easily recover suitable material for bows. Driftwood was scarce in the Baffin Island area and this fact posed a large problem for the Inuit bowyers. If wood was ever found these pieces were often brittle and of poor quality, so antler was commonly employed for bow-building. The Southern Type backing is not suited for making several piece bows. However the more elaborate Arctic type backing is perfectly adapted for piecing together bows from several pieces.

This is how bows from the Baffin Island area look like. (fig 1, Birket-Smith 1918)

Any anthropologist researching and sharing knowledge on traditional skills should be mindful to the original narrative of the cultural area he is working with. This approach provides real possibilities for native elders and young people to interact with their environment in the same way as their ancestors did. Buying wood such as ash for bows from the local lumber store is only a half-way marker, it´s a good start but it should not be the ultimate goal. The risk is also that people are willing to settle for a ”lesser” version because the ”real-deal” is so much more difficult to make and probably performs less well than a top-of-the-line lumberyard bow.

A lot of hidden knowledge is being overlooked this way and perhaps even lost when choosing not to make the extra effort and going all the way with challenging reconstructions.

Cook Inlet sea-otter arrow, this type of arrows where only used for marine hunting.Mason 1894, plate LIX.

Another issue that I think is a bit problematic with the Callahan project was the two sets of arrows that he made to go along with the Yup'ík bow. One of these sets are replicas of Cook inlet arrows intended for caribou hunting. Callahan has been inspired by the sea-otter arrows from Cook inlet area and presents his own versions of these as replicas. These are in fact not replicas at all as these type of arrows which Callahan ”replicated” with obsidian points do not exist in any museum collections. This type of arrows with rounded bulbous nocks and high fletching were exclusively used for hunting sea otters or water foul from kayaks. The arrows used for land mammal hunting in the same Cook inlet area are of a entirely different type. In this case Callahan should have made it clear that these arrows are a distortion of the original and have no real scientific value as such.

It is important to be clear on when a project is more about "primitivist" experimentation than the reproduction of real ethnographic artifacts.  

Alutiiq bow in the Furuhjelm collection and the replica. Photo Marcus Lepola.

Further reading:

Birket-Smith, Kaj 1918. The Greenland bow. Meddelelser om Grönland p 1-28. Bianco Lunds bogtryggeri, Köpenhavn.

Callahan, Errett 2001. Archery in the Arctic 1-3. Primitive Technology II – Ancestral Skills, p. 119-133. From the Society of Primitive Technology, ed. David Westcott. Gibbs & Smith Publisher, Salt Lake City.

Mason, Otis Tufton 1894. North American Bows, Arrows and Quivers. The Smithsonian Report for 1893, pages 631-679. Government Printing Office, Washington.

Murdoc, John 1890. A study of the Eskimo bows in the U.S. National Museum.From the Report of the Smithsonian Institution 1883-84 part II, pages 307-316, I-XII. Government Printing Office, Washington.