INUPIAQ BOW DRILL

Robert Hayden Museum, Sayre, Pennsylvania

George Terasaki, New York, acquired from the above in 1964

Steven C. Brown, Transfigurations: North Pacific Coast Art. George Terasaki, Collector, Seattle, 2006, n.p., pl. 67 (multiple views)

The bow drill is an ingenious device that rapidly spins a wooden shaft, which can be tipped with a bone or metal drill for making holes or spun against a fireboard with dry tinder to kindle a fire by friction. A rawhide cord makes one turn around the drill shaft and is fastened to the ends of a wood or ivory bow. One end of the shaft is captured in the socket of a special stone mouthpiece, and the drill-end is held against the workpiece. One hand of the carver holds and maneuvers the workpiece while the other operates the bow. The drill shaft spins one way and then the other as fast as the bow is drawn back and forth. Walrus ivory has been used for bow drills engraved with surface designs for at least two hundred years. The first bow drill to be collected by a European was carried to England by Captain James Cook’s 1778 arctic voyage. At the time the illustrative style of engraving pictographs down the length of a bow drill was already established. Bow drills collected on the Kotzebue expedition of 1816 were also engraved with the same type of small figures and scenes of hunting, whaling and umiak (skin-covered boat) travel seen in this example. Engraving on bow drills and other ivory surfaces continued to develop through the nineteenth century. Many of the tradition’s finest practitioners perished in the influenza pandemic of 1918, after which the pictographic style eventually gave way to the sculptural work commonly seen today.

Finely engraved in the surface of this bow are caribou, whales swimming and diving, men fishing and building an umiak, men with hunting weapons, kayakers, whale hunters paddling in umiaks and striking with a harpoon, native people in a foreign vessel, and other scenes less decipherable than these. To structure the composition, a baseline was engraved parallel to each edge of the obverse and reverse surfaces. The engraved images relate to these lines like the surface of the earth or the sea. When looked at from the side, one set of images is always right-side up, the other upside down. Some of the figures engraved on one baseline extend into the space of the images on the other edge. In the Inupiaq world view, neither time nor space were divided in the same manner as in the tradition of their Western visitors.

Steven C. Brown