LD3: Neutral Coloration

My third illustration for Lucy's Dance treats the delicate topic of the missionaries who visited Stebbins in the late 1920's and stopped the Curukaq festival . . . or rather, tamed it into hiatus. A Jesuit missionary, Fr. Martin Lonneaux, overlooking the support-system of the Yup'ik community, perceived that the gift-giving portion of the festival was costly enough that it left several Yup'ik families destitute. Lonneaux concocted a watered-down version of the potlatch that would involve smaller, church-supplied gifts, but in the process amputated the festive spirit of the festival such that his "pretend kassiyuq" never caught on. For further details, see Stebbins Dance Festival (xxiv).

The wording in Lucy's Dance focuses neutrally on the cultural misunderstanding. It would have been easy to use powerfully-charged language when summarizing this cultural loss. From what little I can find about him, Fr. Lonneaux, SJ seems to have been a relatively tolerant fellow as missionaries go, translating and publishing prayers so that they could be spoken in Native Alaskan languages.

Author Deb Vannasse and I agreed on short descriptions of the illustrations before I began drawing at all. This piece was meant to include a priest in a fairly desolate image of the village. As a visual narrator, I did my best to depict the priest as well-intentioned rather than oppressive. He should, I decided, appear a little disconnected, introspective, and absorbed in his own faith. (Note: I tried to draw all five decades on the rosary, but they just didn't show up from a distance).

I have placed the priest with his back to the small cabins that began to populate the Stebbins landscape as the Yup'ik people became less nomadic, probably sometime in the 1930s. The UAF photo archives provided one image of such a cabin. Kathy Willie, a Stebbins woman who remembers this period, recalls that the first few huts were constructed from logs and scrap wood. Kathy's family used wood remnants from an empty brothel in nearby St. Michaels to build their house.

DESIGN NOTES:

I had a field day drumming up with simplified patterns and textures to depict the water and landscape. From here on I'll be drawing more contemporary, indoor scenes, using similar design elements to keep the look consistent.

For variety, I shifted the view of the landscape a bit from the layout sketch. This allowed me to draw the most expensive and sought-after gift that could be given at Curukaq: a hand-made qayaq. So far, I'm sticking to my formula of making background elements textured and people/foreground relatively flat.

Sadly, the Jesuit garb does not commonly come in the fruity breakfast-cereal colors that I used to add depth to my previous illustration. However, considering that I'm going for stark and somewhat desolate, the muted colors feel appropriate.

The inset in the bottom corner shows dance sticks and drums banished to a closet in the potlatch-free years. One of the dance sticks is a fur animal tail on a stick, which I'm not sure comes across in the drawing, so it may see the eraser end of my stylus.