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But realizing that potential will not be easy. His first,
monumental, task is simply documenting what’s in the collection now
stored at the Makah Cultural Center.
His second task is a structural analysis, determining patterns.
In spite of the extraordinary preservation of the artifacts taken
from Ozette, many of the patterns are faded by their 400-year
burial. He discerns the designs through careful study and then
drawing them.
He’s developed a technique for abstracting the designs. “I enlarge
images of Ozette art from digital photographs and see things you
don’t see from a macro perspective. Then I go back to the macro and
there it is. One thing I looked at for 30 years, a comb, a
wavy line…” Once he enlarged it and outlined the
design, he realized it was the outline of a whale.
“So my technique for documenting actually became a method
of discovery.”
Finally, he determines how the pieces relate to other coastal
art. This analysis is hardly straightforward.
Some of the pieces of art likely did not originate at Ozette.
“That’s to be expected,” says Mauger. “Knowing what we know of
ceremonial exchange and movement of stuff on the Northwest coast,
there are things I’m sure were produced by Salish speakers and
Nuu-chah-nulth [relatives of the Makah in British Columbia].
“The geometrics [design] may relate to are from around the
Columbia River.”
The Makahs’ long-time residence is at a very strategic location,
says Mauger. Positioned at the mouth of the Strait of Juan de Fuca,
the Makahs exerted cultural influence up and down the coasts of
Washington and Oregon as well as Vancouver Island. Mauger considers
their role as “almost brokers.”
A fundamental element of Mauger’s study is determining “Is it
art?” Take canoe paddles, for example. “There are elegant
canoe paddles, but there are clunky canoe paddles, too.”
Does decoration in addition to a utilitarian function make it
art? Or consider the wooden boxes found in the houses. They were
made by scoring, then-steam bending thin
cedar planks, then lacing on a bottom. They were so precisely
constructed they were water-tight. The craftsmanship lends them an
artistic elegance as well as function.
And is the extra work evident on some of them necessary for
their function? “If not, then it’s probably art,” says
Mauger.
Then again, interpreting a much different culture is tricky.
One of the more interesting artifacts in the Ozette collection
is an inch-and-a-half-tall bone carving. I assumed, given the
apparent head, torso, and limbs, it is a human abstraction.
Not so fast, says Mauger.
“I don’t have any real information on the piece…one of the more
intriguing in the collection,” he writes in an email exchange.
“ As for it being a stylized human…maybe, but I wouldn’t even
go that far. It is doubtlessly iconic and icons are very
culture-bound. I am increasingly hesitant to project a 21st
century, Western cultural, interpretation on such a piece; doing so
probably tells us more about ourselves than the people or person
who made it.
“On the other hand, on the purely structural level, it is an
interesting construction of fairly typical Coast Salish style
crescents, circles, and a trigon, using both positive and negative
space. (Which is not to imply that it was made by a Coast Salish
speaker—that is just the name of a widespread art style first noted
in Coast Salish territory).”
But, he concludes, “Enough of the anthropology talk. I don’t
have a clue….”
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