By ARIADNE WILL
Sentinel Staff Writer
Artist Amber Webb is used to traveling with her 12-foot qaspeq imprinted with the faces of missing and murdered Indigenous women.
But with the pandemic, she had to turn it over to Sitka Assembly member Crystal Duncan to receive it and take care of it.
“I’m usually the one who puts it up. I’m used to doing a lot of the leg work myself,” Webb told the Sentinel. “I was surprised to see someone else who was willing to do that.”
A detail of the 12-foot-tall qaspeq on display at the Sitka Public Library shows drawings of missing and murdered Alaska Native women. (Sentinel Photo by James Poulson)
The piece, brought here by Sitka’s Decolonization Group, heads back to Anchorage soon — today was its last day on display at Sitka Public Library. It was pictured on the front page of the Feb. 10 issue of the Sentinel.
Webb, who was born in Dillingham and who now lives in Anchorage, said it was hard to send the qaspeq to Sitka, but she trusted Duncan.
“It was kind of terrifying, but Crystal had a good plan and made me feel really safe,” Webb said.
The qaspeq has the faces of women from around the U.S. and Canada, and is the second such qaspeq Webb has made. The first, which has Alaskans only, is now in the Anchorage Museum.
Webb, who is Yup’ik, said she chose to include portraits of women not from Alaska on her second qaspeq because the violence against Indigenous women is one that accompanies them, wherever they are.
“I realized pretty quickly that it didn’t matter what life circumstances these women lived in,” Webb said. “It didn’t matter if they’d experienced difficulties, if they had money or an education – all these European standards of success – they were still going to be targeted because of their ethnicity.”
In her own research, Webb has identified boarding schools and general racism as the underlying causes of violence against Native women.
She said this violence is something she’s been aware of for years, but it wasn’t something that was easy to trace.
“I remember in high school and even in middle school, you’d see reports of missing people on the news sometimes, or someone being missing or someone being found,” she said. “I remember thinking how interesting it was that there was not much said, and you never really heard what happened.”
Then in 2012, the violence reached Webb’s own community with the disappearance of Valerie Sifsof. And in 2016, Webb’s childhood friend, LoriDee Wilson, went missing.
“I woke up wanting to do a project on this issue,” Webb said. “I wanted to represent the numbers somehow – surely this is being tracked somehow.”
She first began drawing portraits of MMIW after waking up to a news report of a woman who’d been murdered on New Year’s Day, 2018.
“I just went to the thrift store and I found some white sheets and I realized that all I could do was draw portraits,” she said. “I needed to show that humanity and I needed to show it all together in one place.”
The portraits are all done in Sharpie, and take between three and six hours each.
Webb says she prays before drawing each portrait, and usually smudges with labrador or sage or some other sort of medicine.
“It feels like I know them – you can tell a lot about someone from their facial expression,” she said. “There was one person who I met at a gas station – a boy at a gas station – and I was like, ‘I know you. I know I’ve met you before.’”
After the person said he hadn’t met Webb before, she discovered that she recognized him from the bone structure of his face — it was the same as his mother’s, whom Webb had drawn for her MMIW project.
The same thing happened when she was drawing Veronica Abouchuck, who went missing in 2018.
“It kept looking like Martha Toms, and I was getting really frustrated because they don’t always come out as a true likeness – sometimes I draw them several times and they just don’t come out right,” Webb said.
She didn’t know until much later that Abouchuck and Toms — who was killed in 2005 — had been sisters.
“I don’t know if it was months later when there was an article in the news about how Veronica and Martha were sisters,” she said. “It just struck me that from their faces I realized that they were related, even if I didn’t know they were related.”
This overlap in community is something that Webb says is apparent in many aspects of the project. This includes in displaying the qaspeq, where Webb says there are three things that always happen.
“A Native woman – at least one, usually more than one – will come up to me and say, ‘I was very nearly a part of this project. I could have been up there.’ That tells me that our rates of violence against women are pretty profound,” she said.
The second is that people always tell her stories of relatives or friends who have been killed. Webb says that this is remarkable, considering how small the Indigenous population is.
The third regards white men, who Webb says she notices become the most emotional when viewing the project.
“Not all of them, but there will always be one of them – one white man, usually dressed in a suit – who will cry,” she said.
Webb thinks the latter is the result of white men not needing to remember the risks of being a Native woman.
“When you are a white man, you don’t have to understand what it’s like to be a Native woman,” she said.
But with a project like this, the grief of MMIW can be shouldered by more than Indigenous women and communities.
“That project – (Native women) all carry that weight,” she said. “We shouldn’t have to.”
More information on MMIW can be found at sovereign-bodies.org.
Those seeking support in Sitka can call the SAFV crisis line at (907) 747-6511, or the SAFV business line at (907) 747-3370.
