By HENRY COLT
Sentinel Staff Writer
Sitka artist Peter Williams has won the $50,000 Luce Indigenous Knowledge Fellowship.
The national fellowship supports “intellectual leaders in Native communities who are actively working to generate, perpetuate and disseminate indigenous knowledge,” the First Nations Development Institute said in its announcement of Williams’ achievement.
Williams, who is Yup’ik, is one of ten fellows who were selected from a pool of more than 550 applicants. Each fellow will receive an additional $25,000 to continue their work after the fellowship year is over.
“This is a huge honor,” said Williams, whose work has provoked discussion in major publications like the Guardian and the New York Times.
“It’s a huge compliment in the recognition of my cultural work, and a huge compliment that they understand and respect what I’m doing,” Williams said.
He is an interdisciplinary artist who uses fur from both seals and sea otter as his medium. He hunts and skins the animals himself, and eats what he can of the meat. He says that following Yup’ik custom, he gives each otter a drink of water as a way of saying thanks.
Sitka artist Peter Williams sits in front of one of his “fur paintings,” titled “Our Hunting Relationship to Sea Otters.” Thursday at his home. On Wednesday it was announced that Williams received the $50,000 Luce Indigenous Knowledge Fellowship out of a pool of more than 550 applicants. (Sentinel Photo by James Poulson)
In the past, he’s used the fur to make wearable art, like the pencil skirt with a fur front and turquoise mohair back that he showed the Sentinel Thursday.
But he says he is transitioning to “fur paintings”: hand-stitched collages of fur scraps stretched over canvas stretcher bars like “one would a painting.”
As an Alaska Native, Williams is legally allowed to hunt sea otters. The most recent Southeast Alaska U.S. Fish and Wildlife stock assessment stated that the Southeast Alaska stock of sea otter is not endangered, threatened or depleted.
But Williams said many people – especially non-Natives outside Alaska – are under the impression that the sea otters he hunts are endangered.
“It comes from preconceived notions people have about sea otters and Alaska Natives,” Williams said. “They are out of touch with the current realities of sea otter well-being and the current realities of Alaska Native culture.”
He said non-Natives outside Alaska tend to view the fur trade as it was more than 200 years ago.
“This is something that’s so beautiful to me, and makes so much sense to me,” Williams said of his art. “And then to find that not only does it repulse a lot of people, but that they just don’t seem to be able to understand it – while they have leather on their shoes, don’t know where their food comes from, and don’t know that they’re wearing a plant.”
Williams says he will use the fellowship money for two projects related to education: he will spread a curriculum based on “Harvest: Quyurciq,” a film he co-produced about the sea otter harvest and the subsequent craftwork on the skins by Alaska Natives, and continue making art that educates its audience.
One example of the latter is a fur painting called “Our Hunting Relationship to Sea Otters.”
“The height represents the estimated population of sea otters in Southeast Alaska,” he said, pointing to the top of the art work, which is 44 inches high and 44 and three-quarters wide.
“This top line here represents the Potential Biological Removal (PBR),” said Williams, pointing to a horizontal streak where the fur has been sheared. The PBR refers to the maximum number of otters that can be removed from a stock while still allowing an optimum population.
“This bottom line,” he said, pointing to a strip of sheared fur near the bottom of the composition, “represents the actual take — what Alaska Natives are taking.”
In a written explanation of the piece, Williams references data indicating that Alaska Natives are taking only a quarter of the PBR.
But Williams says the educational component of his work – and the constant re-explanation it requires – runs the risk of becoming tiresome.
“With each statement I make, two more games of whack-a-mole appear,” said Williams, with a laugh.
He says some viewers of his art encounter a mental block when it comes to understanding Williams as someone who practices his culture in a modern context.
“When I was working on these art pieces, people would ask me why I used a rifle on a traditional hunt,” said Williams. “And I would say, it’s the same reason we’re speaking the English language.”
