On the Museum

An Event Score for Kodiak Alutiit 1 (Helen Simeonoff )1

An Alutiiq person enters and says

This event score is longer than most. My job is to tell. Your job is to listen. Listen to the quiet around the words. Listen for the sparse and melancholic.2

Then

Alphonse Pinart collected Alutiiq masks on our island in 1872 and took them to France.

Then

Over a century later Helen Simeonoff, our relative, travelled from Kodiak Island to the masks held in a collection in France. She was the first.

Then

Many Alutiit travelled from Kodiak Island to the masks held in a collection in France. They tell us that when they touched the masks, they wept.

Then

The Alutiiq masks eventually travelled back to Kodiak Island but only because we had an Alutiiq Museum to exhibit them and only if we promised to never repatriate the masks.

Then

The promise was made and vitrines were built.

Then

We looked at the masks behind glass. Some masks we quickly looked away from. Which masks were we supposed to see? Mostly we looked at the texts alongside the masks that attempted to tell us what the masks meant.

Then

We felt the masks when we looked at them.

Then

We felt the masks when we touched them.

Then

We think about the text remnants left by Alphonse Pinart and all that was held in our people before he ever travelled to our island to collect.

Then

We exceed the text remnants in Pinart’s translations of our songs and dances from Alutiiq to Russian to English to French and back again.

Then

We exceed the Alphonse Pinart collection of Alutiiq masks.

An Event Score for Kodiak Alutiit 2 (To Ale˘s Hrdli˘cka)

An Alutiiq person enters and says We exceed the archaeological site.

Then

We exceed the discipline formation of Anthropology.

Then

We exceed the structures imposed on us.