Monday, December 8, 2008

Aleut Boat Builders/Elders

I found some photos of Aleut boat builders/elders and am posting them here as promised. These photos and captions were posted at the school in Akutan, Alaska. I shot photos of the photos when I was there in about 2004 helping Kurt Schmidt teach baidarka building in shop class.


This is a photo of Bill Tcheripanoff ca. 1970. He's holding up a piece of braided seal or sea lion intestine. At the time, Bill was being interviewed by Joelle Robert-Lamblin, a French anthropologist about the topic of baidarkas.


Here's another photo of Bill Tcheripanoff about a dozen years after the previous picture was taken. He's holding a fox trap in his lap.


Here's the caption that went with the photo.


This one is a photo of Sergie Sovoroff and one of the baidarka models that he built.


And here's the caption that went with the photo of Sergie. By the way, Mike Livingston studied with Sergie and told me that Sergie's models are in museums all over the place, but never with his name on them.

3 comments:

Thomas Armstrong said...

wolfgang, excellent post, do you have more history for us?

Wolfgang Brinck said...

Some more posts coming up. Not exactly history, but more pictures for sure.

Unknown said...

Thanks Wolf for acknowledging the significant contributions of Bill and Sergie. What we know about Aleut sea kayaks today is at least partially thanks to the work and dedication of Sergie and Bill. Also, Sergie specifically requested that, from time to time, we mention his name. Acknowledging and respecting our elders is an important component of ancient Unangan values. I wish more iqyax builders would take a few moment to acknowledge where these ancient maritime sea craft designs originated.

Michael "Iqyax" Livingston
Cold Bay, Alaska
michaellivingstonalaska@gmail.com