The illustrations in Boas’s 1897 book derived mostly from field photography or drawings of objects in museum collections. Figure 12 is unique as it replicates a drawing he commissioned from a Kwakwaka’wakw artist. Boas had long solicited drawings from Native artists. For instance, in 1884 he asked Inuit consultants to draw maps for him.¹ As part of the Jesup North Pacific Expedition, a large ethnographic collecting project in the North Pacific Coast, the Bering Strait, and Siberia from 1897 to 1902, Boas and his colleagues collected Native drawings of tattoos, masks, crests, house front designs, ceremonies and dances, and episodes from legends.² Drawings provided Boas with data to analyze visual forms, prompts for eliciting stories, and the basis for published illustrations.

A large set of drawings in the collection of the American Museum of Natural History, stylistically similar to this one, are now attributed to ’Namgis artist Hiłamas (whose English name was Chief Ned Harris).³ These drawings depict Kwakwaka’wakw ceremonial scenes and crest motifs. A group of five utilize the same paper type (a slightly textured paper with bonded vertical lines) and stylus (slightly wider than a color pencil) as this example, suggesting they were drawn at the same time (AMNH Z/32a-e). Hiłamas drew another series of images on the back of pre-printed face templates that were likely produced for the Jesup expedition (AMNH Z/30a-p). A third set is on a smooth paper utilizing a thinner pencil (AMNH Z/31a-u). The use of different supports and pigments for distinct batches of drawings indicate a sustained relationship of artistic commissions between Boas, Hunt and Hiłamas.⁴ Boas published other drawings by Hiłamas throughout his career.⁵

This drawing depicts a half of a Sisiyutł, a powerful supernatural creature with two horned serpent heads and a horned human head. The book figure is captioned “one side of a drum,” suggesting the possible source object. The drums in question are constructed using the same technique as bentwood storage boxes but are narrower and open on one side for better acoustics (Fig. 1). In his drawing, Hiłamas fills the available space on the page as if it were the side of a drum. This distinctive use of space was lost, along with any significance in the coloring, when Boas had the motif redrawn in black ink in order to reproduce it in the book (Fig. 2).

The original colored pencil drawing has four pinholes in its corners as if it has been pinned to a board, perhaps for research reference or to assist in copying it to ink for reproduction in The Social Organization. The drawing is annotated with Boas’s research notes, which enabled him to describe the Sisiyutł’s anatomical parts in his text.⁶ There are additional research and publication notes in a number of different hands, which have not yet been identified, indicating the drawing’s active use among a collaborative research and publication team.

By Amanda Thompson