Yup’ik Yaaruin (Storyknife)
This fall, while working from home due to COVID-19 like so many of us, one of my projects was a collaboration with Alaska Native culture-bearers to create distance-learning resources based on museum collections. With children in mind, my thoughts turned to how we learn from playing games and how there are levels of meaning in both the games and the items used to play them. One example is the storyknife, called a yaaruin in Yugtun, the Yup’ik language.
To learn more about the yaaruin and to co-create an education unit on Alaska Native games, I contacted Veronica Kaganak, a Yup’ik culture-bearer and fluent speaker from Scammon Bay who is also a teacher, transcriber and translator. The finished education unit included an essay about the yaaruin written from a phone conversation Veronica had with Yup’ik Elder Vivian Jimmy, which was recorded and translated. Though a bit awkward and not as fruitful as speaking in person during a visit over ayut (tundra tea in Yugtun), both enjoyed sharing memories of playing with a yaaruin in their youth.
Vivian and Veronica learned how to tell stories with a yaaruin by watching other little girls. Veronica said they would spit on the mud and use their yaaruin “to make it very flat and shiny,” then sketch figures for a story as they told it to their audience. They drew things like the layout and furniture of a house or scenes outside, imagining a life they wanted in the future. Veronica told me that although children in the Yup’ik community no longer play with a yaaruin, she shares this experience from her childhood by using a dry-erase marker and a whiteboard in her classroom to draw and tell stories.
The ivory yaaruin pictured was collected for the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History in 1879 from Kongiganak, a Yup’ik village in Southwest Alaska. Fathers and grandfathers sculpted them from ivory, antler, bone, wood or scrap metal into a shape similar to a large butter knife. Although girls outgrew using them, this one was made with great artistry and care and seems to be a clear demonstration of love for a daughter. Some storyknives held in museum collections are plain and some are embellished, but this yaaruin is exceptionally complex and beautifully detailed. There are many thoughtful elements: animal heads for the grip, a delicate face in profile at the tip, and near its centre, the circle-and-dot motif representing the spiritual belief of ellam iinga (in Yugtun). Ellam iinga is defined as “the eye of the universe and awareness” by Yup’ik scholar Theresa Arevgaq John in her PhD thesis, Yuraryararput Kangiitllu: Our Ways of Dance and Their Meanings. She writes that “the use of this decorative motif is associated with both spiritual vision and the creation of a pathway between the human and spirit worlds.”
During this pandemic, when we no longer take so many things for granted and miss new experiences, there are cultural treasures waiting to be shared through museum collections—like this yaaruin—that can help us engage in new ways to play, to imagine and to share. These treasures from the past can teach us the values of making everyday tools we work and play with visually and symbolically beautiful, connecting us to others and to beliefs we hold dear.
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Dawn Biddison is the Museum Specialist at the Alaska office of the Smithsonian Arctic Studies Center. Since 2002, she has worked with Alaska Native Elders, scholars, culturebearers and artists on collaborative heritage projects, from museum exhibition and website work to community-based documentation and revitalization residencies, workshops and public programs.