Ryan Bukowski is a hunter and fisherman, carpenter and father, whose walrus ivory carvings are unique and priceless. He lives in a little gray house on the southwest side of Chevak. The house itself doesn’t stand out, but what’s hanging on his living room wall does. It’s covered in old photos.
“All the guys that taught me, all the Elders,” Bukowski explained as he pointed to smiling faces and sifted through the memories of all of the people who taught him how to create things with his hands in the traditional Cup’ik way.
“When I was growing up, I used to sneak into the sod house and watch them carve and, you know the Elders, they all taught me how to make the tools first,” Bukowski said. He said that he watched closely, and eventually he started to dabble in ivory carving himself.
“All the tricks and the things I'm doing now I learned by self-teaching,” Bukowski said. But he credits the basics and “hard knowledge” to the people who are in the photos covering his wall. “I started taking advice and learning, and was so motivated by it from when I was about five,” he said.
There’s a piece of artwork that hangs on the same wall that’s proof that all of those years of practice have had incredible results: a large, mounted walrus skull. Two giant tusks hang from the skull. Bukowksi spent months creating the artwork from this skull and its tusks. He carved two pairs of smaller walrus from ivory and fastened them to the cheekbones of the skull. Each one is about the size of an apricot. Their thin, delicate, pointy tusks stick out, threatening to spear Bukowski’s fingers as he shows off his meticulous work.
Using an engraving technique widely used by Alaska Native artists known as scrimshawing, Bukowksi carved the fine lines of wrinkled walrus skin. Even walrus whiskers are scrimshawed onto the bone and ivory by hand. Below that, on the two long tusks that protrude downward from the walrus skull, he carefully scrimshawed a hunting story.
“There’s an Eskimo man here and a walrus,” Bukowski said, pointing to the characters etched into the ivory. “There’s a spring hunting story. That’s gonna be on that tusk. This here is the [walrus] herd, there’s a walrus here, there’s a man hunting it, and then there’s a celebration.” The story tells itself moving downward from the top of the tusk to the tip.
In recent years, Bukowski’s art work has become a primary source of income. A few years back he was in an accident involving a forklift. “I had a brain injury, and a back injury, and a pelvis injury, so I can’t really do a lot of work that I used to,” he said.
Bukowski said that some of his pieces, including the one hanging on his wall, might take more than a year to complete. “A piece like this, if I was to sell it, something like that could go up to $35,000,” he said. He reached for a box on the floor and dragged it out from under a piece of furniture. “This one here is very different.” The box was screwed tightly closed, so he grabbed a drill and started to remove the lid. Inside the homemade box was a single, long walrus tusk, mounted horizontally to a wooden stand. “This is also a spring theme. A walrus harvesting season,” Bukowksi explained.
All the characters in the piece are hand-carved from ping-pong-ball-sized walrus teeth. A small hunter, who wears a parka with a thick fur ruff, stands on top of the long tusk. He is holding a tiny harpoon, aimed at a walrus, and the animal’s head sticks out from near the bottom of the tusk. On the other end of the tusk perches a little snowy owl, watching this springtime hunt play out.
“[The] snowy owl is always out there in the spring,” Bukowski said. “Then the head mounts are walrus teeth, again there’s a polar bear going after a walrus, and here’s the human being going after the walrus.”
Art itself, Bukowski says, only comes alive if the artist is willing to commit to it.
“The thing about art is patience. You need to have patience, and then you need to be one with your work,” Bukowski said as he slipped the wooden lid back down over his carved tusk and drilled the screws back into the box. “It’s kind of like therapy. You work at something so long, by the time you're done it has its own story,” he said.
There’s a common thread among the stories Bukowski carves onto these tusks: food security. “Behind every catch you have a storyline. And if you don’t keep that going, then what’s the purpose of doing any hunt?” he asked. “If you ain’t gonna bring it home to eat it, and resource from the things you get off the animal, then I don’t see the purpose of going out and killing something if you aren’t gonna use it for anything.”
Bukowski's own food security has been at the top of his mind since September 2022, when the remnants of Typhoon Merbok damaged much of his fishing and hunting gear. Because the power was out for days, it ruined most of the contents of three giant chest freezers: all of the fish, meat, berries, and greens he’d gathered from the tundra around Chevak.
Bukowski said that he’s had luck growing lots of his own vegetables. “Potatoes, carrots, cabbage, turnips, peas… radish,” he said, listing off what he’s been able to harvest in recent years. He has plans to increase local food security in Chevak if he can sell one of his pieces. “I’m gonna use [the money] to start up a gardening system right here in Chevak. With my own money I grew some vegetables and came up with some big, good vegetables.”
Ideally, Bukowski wants to see both of these pieces stay in Chevak. He might try to sell them to the school so that kids like him can see what they’re capable of creating.
This reporting was made possible through the CIRI Foundation’s Journey to What Matters grant program.
