Bering Island, Aleutian Islands / Commander Islands, Russia, Asia / North America
Accession Date:
28 Nov 1883
Collection Date:
1882 to 1883
Notes:
Illus. Fig. 155, p. 159 in in Black, Lydia. 2003. Aleut art = Unangam aguqaadangin. Virginia Beach, VA: Donning Co. Publishers. Identified there as dancing shawl of gut. Rectangular gut cape or shawl painted in alternating bands of red and black pigment, with natural color of gut showing inbetween, both horizontally and vertically.
This object is on loan to the Anchorage Museum at Rasmuson Center, from 2010 through 2027.
Source of the information below: Smithsonian Arctic Studies Center Alaska Native Collections: Sharing Knowledge website, by Aron Crowell, entry on this artifact http://alaska.si.edu/record.asp?id=168, retrieved 5-8-2014: Dance cape This gut (intestine) dancing cape was collected from the Unangan residents of Bering Island by Leonhard Stejneger in 1882. No details are known about its use. However, Merck mentioned a similar cape that was used in a dance he witnessed in 1790: "A man holds a mask in front of his face, and his jumps and turns stay exactly in time with the beats of the hand drum. In each hand he holds two blown-up stomachs of sea animals. He swings them about to the same beat. Sometimes he throws these away and instead picks up a red-and-white-striped blanket made of gutskin." According to Sarychev, who also witnessed this dance, it ridiculed a vain hunter who boasted about the many animals that he had caught, which were represented by the bladders and blanket
