The Alutiiq Museum and Archaeological Repository supports Alaska Native artists locally and statewide, and it just announced the acquisition of a couple of beaded art pieces, including a headdress from an artist in Old Harbor.
“It’s kind of like my escape from what other stuff is going on in my life, like all my other work,” said Kayla Christiansen, the cook at her family’s business, Ocean View Lodge, and beads in her free time.
It’s a craft she’s done since she was 7-years-old.
“We have Alutiiq weeks down here and we have a lot of instructors that come down and teach us how to bead and sew and everything like that, so I picked that up from one of these Alutiiq weeks and I’ve just been beading ever since,” she said.
She made her first headdress when she was 12 and completed her next when she was 18.
Alutiiq dancers would have worn the headdresses, Christiansen said, and the longer the headdress, the more powerful the woman.
“Because the Alutiiq people had to trade with the Russians to get the beads, the longer that your headdress was, the higher you were in status in the village,” she said.
Over the past five years, Christiansen has made 16 headdresses, each of which takes anywhere from a week and a half to a month.
She often works on commission, but one of the pieces the Alutiiq Museum bought was a headdress she completed for an exhibit in Sitka.
She says the theme was the Alaska Native perspective on the purchase of Alaska by the United States, and she used colors from the American and Russian flags in addition to the traditional Alutiiq colors of red, white and black.
She describes how grey and black beads depict the suppression of Alutiiq language and identity.
Christiansen said she’s happy that the Alutiiq Museum purchased the piece.
“It’s gonna get appreciated so much there,” she said. “A lot of people wanted to buy that one that’s in Sitka right now, but I didn’t want to sell it because I just didn’t want it to go to someone that wasn’t gonna to appreciate it, that wasn’t gonna to look at it and read the story about it and just be like, ‘Wow, that’s amazing.’ So, I’m just really, really thankful.”
The Alutiiq museum received an overall grant of $8,800 to purchase the most recent acquisitions by Christiansen and Wasilla-based artist, Cheryl Lacy.
The funds come from the Rasmuson Foundation’s Art Acquisition Fund, which Museums Alaska administers.
