The back rooms of the Anchorage Museum are lined with shelves and drawers. “Yeah, Anchorage Museum has a lot,” said Golga Oscar as the museum’s deputy director of conservation and collections, Monica Shah, led him through a dimly lit corridor.
Oscar is a Yup’ik fashion designer and traditional skin sewer. He was in Anchorage to look at some of the regalia in the museum’s collection for both inspiration and education.
“The reason why I came here is to observe the work, but also revitalize what was discontinued back in the day,” said Oscar.
Shah served as Oscar’s guide. She stopped at a bank of drawers and pulled one out. “These are some hats and headwear that Golga has requested,” she said as she carefully pulled back tissue paper to reveal a collection of hats and headdresses, rich in color and texture. Some were made 100 years ago, but they look brand new.
“These are all listed as being Yup’ik and I will look them up,” Shah told Oscar. “Some of them look like Nunivak,” he said. These designs are Cup’ig from Nunivak Island.
It’s taken Oscar a lot of time and attention to detail to be able to identify and recognize various design elements that indicate where a piece came from and who might have made it. In this case, he said that it was the wolverine tassels that gave the hat’s location of origin away “because of how they incorporate the neck part of the wolverine – the white spots,” he explained. “ A lot of people from Nunivak incorporate wolverine neck tassels. And also the calf skin of how it’s structured. But I could be wrong,” he smiled.
Oscar grew up in the Yup’ik tundra village of Kasigluk and is a self-taught skin sewer. All this attention to detail is reflected in nearly every aspect of both his work and his life: his hat band is hand beaded, and his forearms are ringed with traditional tattoos or tumaqcat. They are geometric designs that represent his mother’s family. He incorporates those in the cuffs and hemlines of his squirrel skin parkas and around the tops of the seal skin boots, or piluguqs, he’s known for making.
His father’s family is from the Bering Sea coastal village of Tununak, located on Nelson Island. In 2008, Oscar was there for a Messenger Feast, and a weekend's worth of dancing and celebration inspired him to start designing and sewing regalia.
“When you're dancing, you have to think about the valuable thoughts in your mind,” Oscar said. “For example, if I am going to dance, then I’m gonna think about something that I value that I want to work towards. Because when I think about it, it’s gonna come to me in the future,” he said.
“For example, animals. If I'm going to dance, then I am going to think about something I value: animals," Oscar said. “If I’m gonna think about a moose, if I'm going to dance, I'll think about seals, if I'm going to dance, I'll think about extending my life. And then when you put that, I mean when you put that in your thoughts, that's when you're manifesting it.”
Oscar said that’s the kind of energy that inspires his work.
“Every time I sew I tell stories, but I also try to incorporate ancestral life to them,” Oscar said.
Oscar is also careful when he makes decisions about how to incorporate what he observes and learns into his contemporary regalia. He said that it’s essential to think carefully before sharing various designs or making certain details public, “because the knowledge that you have is the knowledge that other people don’t have, but also you have to think about the region that you come from. And when you come from a certain region, they're gonna be different. They’re not necessarily going to agree with you,” he said.
As a whole, the Yup’ik region spans more than 50,000 square miles and is not homogenous. While Oscar himself is Yup’ik, he knows that he doesn’t have sole ownership over generations of cultural design and traditions that vary across a wide swath of Western Alaska.
“Most of the skin sewers and people who are behind that work tell me that in order for you to tell that story, you have to experience it. It’s not my story to tell. I mean just because I hear it doesn’t mean that I experienced it, and I gotta respect that,” Oscar said. “So most of these artifacts, they have stories behind it. Beads behind it, the ways that the beads are structured, the way that the white – the way that the colors are structured, there’s a story behind it.”
Every detail represents something: tassels can represent bows and arrows, Oscar said. White on the shoulders of a parka, he explained, may mean whoever wore it wiped their face there. These items have their own life history. He also likes to make fancy things, and he often adds his own contemporary touches with beads, fur, and fringe.
“Just to bougify it!” Oscar laughed.
Shah pulled out another drawer and unwrapped another piece; this one was breathtaking.
“Can I buy it?” Oscar joked.
He stared in wonder at a flamboyant hat made entirely from the skin and feathers of a milky-white snowy owl.
“It’s because of how old it is, an ancient type of feeling, but also a snowy owl. Snowy owl is really hard to capture, I mean to hunt, because they fly distant. In order for you to catch a snow owl, you have to have that mindset of ‘I'm not gonna catch it,’ because animals can hear through the land,” Oscar said.
According to Shah, the hat is from Goodnews Bay. Oscar said that it was likely made for a man.
“If there was wolf fur then it would be for a woman, but if there’s feathers or caribou hair on the headdress it could also be for a man. But also two-spirit identities are able to wear feather headdresses and caribou headdresses. They cannot wear wolf,” Oscar said.
Oscar identifies as a two-spirit man.
“One of the things I really hate about living where I'm coming from is that it's so small that we're so afraid of being judged. But also, most of the community members, they really support me. They don't make fun of me. They don't really judge me. They’re just like, ‘Thank you for continuing the work that you do. Thank you for pursuing this even though you're a man.’ Like, I'm really thankful. Like, the gratitude that I get from the community members, especially the Elders, [it’s] beyond [a] blessing,” Oscar said.
A lot of Oscar’s work focuses on the integration of both masculinity and femininity. Over the last few years, he’s made hundreds of headdresses, mostly for women. Yup’ik men rarely wear them these days, which Oscar blames on assimilation into Western culture.
“You know, females produce parkas. I mean, that's what I was born and raised hearing, because they were being Westernized. But then traditionally, one of the stories that I heard from Qaluyaat [Nelson Islanders] was of how the men used to also sew for their loved ones to have a parka, to have clothing. Because if they don't have a seamstress, then who's going to make them? How are they going to survive out in the winter? Who's going to, you know, take care of them?” Oscar asked.
Oscar used to be an elementary school teacher. Two years ago, he won both a Youth Leadership Award from the Alaska Federation of Natives and was recognized as a Culture Bearer by the Calista Corporation. Thanks to several other grants and awards, he was able to trade the whiteboards and textbooks for needles, seal skins, and beads. At the end of the 2023 school year, he moved to Tununak to become a full time artist.
Now, some of his own designs are housed in the Anchorage Museum, telling their own stories alongside the work of his ancestors.
This reporting was made possible through the CIRI Foundation’s Journey to What Matters grant program.
